It's strange how HN seems to think that by religiously disagreeing with any progress which is labeled "ML progress" they are somehow displaying their technical knowledge. I don't think this is really useful, and the arguments often have wrong assumptions baked within them. It would be nice to see this pseudo-intellectualism quieted with a more appropriate response to these advancements. For example, I would imagine that there would be a similar response of collective groan for the paper on pagerank so many years ago, but this has clearly provided utility today. Why is it so hard for us to recognize that even small adjustments to algorithms can yeild utility, and this property extends to ML as well?

As someone mentioned above, language models for embedding generation has improved dramatically with these newer MLM/GPT techniques, and even with improvement to F-score/auc/etc. for one use case can generate enormous utility.

Nay-saying really doesn't make you look intelligent.