I think there's some threshold of flags to upvotes and possibly some other metrics that determines whether a story vanishes, but flags can absolutely tip the scales.
It's vital to HN that user flags and/or software like the flamewar detector clear most such submissions off the front page. They tend to attract a lot of upvotes because that's what sensational (and especially indignant-sensational) stories do. Without countervailing mechanisms, HN would be completely taken over by those stories.
His statement wasn't even hyperbolic or fearmongering.....?
He just extrapolated based on current amounts of compute and estimated a possible model size that could be equivalent to AGI (based on current architecture).
Training a model of that size would require too much electricity.
That was his point.
Everyone should run to wise man Altman and he'll protect us from the evil AI. Please pressure governments to regulate the domain until only OpenAI is legally allowed to work with it.
At this point he's indistinguishable from a bitcoin advocate or a tv preacher.