Hype first and context later

Carette Antonin reflecting on the recent viral tweets of Jaana Dogan and Andrej Karpathy and how ‘Influentists’ are hyping up AI only to add context later on, which ends up deflating the hype.

This pattern of “hype first and context later” is actually part of a growing trend.

I call the individuals participating to that trend “The Influentists”. Those people are members of a scientific or technical community, and leverage their large audiences to propagate claims that are, at best, unproven and, at worst, intentionally misleading.

But how can we spot them?

I personally identify these “Influentists” by four personality traits that characterize their public discourse.

The first is a reliance on “trust-me-bro” culture, where anecdotal experiences are framed as universal, objective truths to generate hype. This is a sentiment perfectly captured by the “I’m not joking and this isn’t funny” tone of Rakyll’s original tweet, but also the dramatic “I’ve never felt that much behind as a programmer” from Andrej Karpathy’s tweet. This is supported by an absence of reproducible proof, as these individuals rarely share the code, data, or methodology behind their viral “wins”, an omission made easier than ever in the current LLM era. And finally, they utilize strategic ambiguity, carefully wording their claims with enough vagueness to pivot toward a “clarification” if the technical community challenges their accuracy.