The Moment the AI Hype Cycle Really Kicked In

Does it feel like news about artificial intelligence is inescapable? You’re not just imagining it. Zach Perkel, the Principal and Director of Applied AI at enterprise AI firm Fractal, tracked the number of AI-related posts that managed to crack the top 10 stories on Y Combinator’s Hacker News, and found that we are experiencing peak AI (so far).

Perkel analyzed 24,910 articles and posts that managed to crack the Hacker News top 10 from January 1st, 2019, to August 15th, 2025, to determine just how much momentum the hype train has gained. He found that interest in AI has seemingly 10x-ed from the first quarter of 2019, when just 39 AI-related posts managed to crack the list. By contrast, the third quarter of 2025, which is just barely halfway through its calendar period, has already seen 337 bits of AI content at the top of Hacker News.

It’s no surprise that we’re talking about AI significantly more now than we were in a pre-ChatGPT, pre-AI everywhere world. But what is a bit shocking is just how much the conversation has accelerated recently.

Per Perkel’s data, a huge spike in AI interest happened between the fourth quarter of 2022—which encompasses the public release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022—and the first quarter of 2023, when conversation about the implications of the tool really started to heat up. That period saw a leap from 89 AI-related stories in the top 10 for Q4 2022 to 174 stories in Q1 2023. But that leap—the one that captures the moment we went from the public-facing chatbot not existing to being the dominant way in which people interact with AI—is the only one that is larger than the leap experienced between Q2 2025 and Q3 2025. Given that we’re not even through this quarter, it’s safe to assume that this will become the biggest spike in interest in AI yet.

That’s interesting, because Hacker News is not exactly for the uninitiated. It’s not like that audience is just waking up to the accessibility or ramifications of widespread AI tools. It also makes Perkel’s sentiment analysis of the posts a noteworthy indicator. He found that in the A.C. (After ChatGPT) era, no period has seen a larger percentage of negative posts about AI than the current quarter, which has seen 42% of posts critical of the topic.

It also happens to be a new peak of a short-term trend, which has seen the sentiment on AI shift. In the first quarter of 2025, just 27% of top Hacker News posts on AI were negative. That jumped to 36% in the second quarter, which marked the highest percentage at the time since ChatGPT’s introduction in late 2022—only to get topped again by the Q3 figures.

There is almost certainly an AI bubble, though it’s unclear if it’s about to burst (OpenAI is on the verge of a $500 billion valuation). But there definitely appears to be an AI vibe shift.