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Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now

(dosaygo-studio.github.io)
3337 points keepamovin | 15 comments | 09 Dec 25 15:00 UTC | HN request time: 3.6s | source | bottom
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iambateman ◴[09 Dec 25 16:58 UTC] No.46207321[source]▶
This was a fun little lark. Great idea!

It’s interesting to notice how bad AI is at gaming out a 10-year future. It’s very good at predicting the next token but maybe even worse than humans—who are already terrible—at making educated guesses about the state of the world in a decade.

I asked Claude: “Think ten years into the future about the state of software development. What is the most likely scenario?” And the answer it gave me was the correct answer for today and definitely not a decade into the future.

This is why it’s so dangerous to ask an LLM for personal advice of any kind. It isn’t trained to consider second-order effects.

Thanks for the thought experiment!

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1. vidarh ◴[09 Dec 25 17:34 UTC] No.46207837[source]▶
I thought the page was a hilarious joke, not a bad prediction. A lot of these are fantastic observational humour about HN and tech. Gary Marcus still insisting AI progress is stalling 10 years from now, for example. Several digs at language rewrites. ITER hardly having nudged forwards. Google killing another service. And so on.
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2. MontyCarloHall ◴[09 Dec 25 17:51 UTC] No.46208068[source]▶
That's what makes this so funny: the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, but it's so bad at truly out-of-distribution predictions that an AI-generated 2035 HN frontpage is hilariously stuck in the past. "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is a source of great amusement to us, but deliberately capitalizing on this was certainly not the "intent" of the AI.
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3. lucianbr ◴[09 Dec 25 18:06 UTC] No.46208268[source]▶
Does the prompt say anything about being funny, about a joke? If yes, great. If no, terrible.

And the answer is no.

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4. HDThoreaun ◴[09 Dec 25 18:20 UTC] No.46208460[source]▶
There's no chance "google kills gemini cloud" was an earnest predication. That was 100% a joke
5. jama211 ◴[09 Dec 25 18:22 UTC] No.46208486[source]▶
I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume the AI was earnestly attempting to predict the future, it’s just as likely attempting to make jokes here for the user who prompted it, or neither of those things.
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6. vidarh ◴[09 Dec 25 18:27 UTC] No.46208554[source]▶
There is just no reason whatsoever to believe this is someone "earnestly attempting to predict the future", and ending up with this.
7. vidarh ◴[09 Dec 25 18:36 UTC] No.46208680[source]▶
The prompt is funny, in itself. The notion of predicting the future is itself not a serious prompt, because there is no meaningful way of giving a serious response. But the addition of "Writ it into form!" makes it sound even more jokey.

If I gave a prompt like that and got the response I did, I'd be very pleased with the result. If I somehow intended something serious, I'd have a second look at the prompt, go mea culpa, and write a far longer prompt with parameters to make something somewhat like a serious prediction possible.

8. tempestn ◴[09 Dec 25 18:42 UTC] No.46208762[source]▶
Wait, wouldn't sustained net positive energy be huge? (Though I don't think that's actually possible from ITER unless there were some serious upgrades over the next decade!)
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9. NewsaHackO ◴[09 Dec 25 19:13 UTC] No.46209203[source]▶
If you honestly can't see why this prompt from the get go was a joke, them you may have to cede that LLM have a better grasp as the subtleties of language than you expect.
10. iambateman ◴[09 Dec 25 20:47 UTC] No.46210419[source]▶
I totally agree that it was a funny joke.

But I've noticed that a lot of people think of LLM's as being _good_ at predicting the future and that's what I find concerning.

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11. vidarh ◴[10 Dec 25 14:30 UTC] No.46218091[source]▶
It would be huge, but only 20 minutes would also still mean it's still far away from making fusion workable, so it fits neatly into the standard joke that fusion is perpetually 10 years away.
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12. vidarh ◴[10 Dec 25 14:31 UTC] No.46218116[source]▶
That's a valid concern about the number of people who think people are good at predicting the future too.

(I'll make my prediction: 10 years from now, most things will be more similar to what things are today than most people expected them to be)

13. jklinger410 ◴[10 Dec 25 17:03 UTC] No.46220252{3}[source]▶
Apparently it views HN as a humorous website, and made a comical response to the prompt.
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14. tempestn ◴[10 Dec 25 19:12 UTC] No.46222137{3}[source]▶
True I suppose, though I also expect we're considerably more than 10 years away from 20 minutes of overall net positive output!
15. jama211 ◴[14 Dec 25 05:04 UTC] No.46260877{4}[source]▶
I wouldn’t go that far