{"slug": "show-hn-i-built-an-index-to-measure-ai-fomo", "title": "Show HN: I built an index to measure AI FOMO", "summary": "A developer launched a public index that scores weekly AI news activity, reporting that the week ending 5 Oct 2026 read near its recent baseline at 21 points below the prior week while the current baseline runs 3.1× the 2022–23 level. The index, built from 14,696 records across 20 source streams, weights news velocity (0.31), lab activity (0.25), community attention (0.25) and topic spike (0.2), with a sensitivity check producing scores from 38 to 52. Hacker News accounts for 80% of stored records, and the author states the measure tracks activity in selected English-language, developer-facing sources rather than AI progress or personal anxiety.", "body_md": "# Current observation\n\nHow busy AI news was this week, against the month before.\n\nNear baseline\n\n▼ 21 vs last week\n\nTracked news activity is near its recent baseline.\n\nExploratory news activity, not a measure of AI progress or personal anxiety. Historical readings are reconstructed retrospectively.\n\n## Signals in this reading\n\nlast 7 days vs the 28 before\n- News velocity×0.3120 vs 138/wk▼13%37Collected records from sources eligible for this observation.\n- Lab activity×0.2519 vs 18/wk▲9%57Lab-source headlines matching model, product, agent, media or robotics keywords; not verified launches.\n- Community attention×0.2539 vs 42/wk▼7%44Stories with at least 200 recorded Hacker News points; attention, not importance.\n- Topic spike×0.2Chips & Compute · 9 vs 4.8/wk▲89%35The topic that grew the most this week, versus a typical week's biggest grower.\n- Employment mentionsexperimental0 vs 1.8/wk▼100%7Headlines about jobs, layoffs, hiring and automation of work.\n\n## Illustrative headlines\n\n## Overall FOMO Index\n\nHow busy AI news is now, against when tracking began in Oct 2022.\n\nHigh activity\n\n3.1× the 2022–23 level\n\nThis week reads near its recent baseline, and that baseline itself runs at 3.1× the 2022–23 level.\n\n- News velocity 2.4×\n- Lab activity 4.4×\n- Community attention 2.9×\n\n## How we got here\n\nWeekly activity since Oct 2022, with milestones for context. Milestones are an editorial selection, not inputs to the index.\n\nTrailing 13 weeks vs the first tracked year; weighted geometric mean of the three counting signals, scored so that 1× = 50 and 4× = 80. Growth here includes changes in how much the sources publish, not only in AI itself.\n\n## Research notes Method, sensitivity & source coverage\n\nCan the changing volume and attention around AI be described with a transparent, reproducible index? This study compares a week of collected news with its recent baseline. It measures activity in selected sources, not intelligence, impact, or how far anyone is falling behind.\n\n- Corpus records\n- 14,696\n- Source streams\n- 20\n- Daily reconstructions\n- 1,431\n- Data observed through\n- 5 Oct 2026\n\nSensitivity check\n\n## How much does the method matter?\n\nRecompute this observation with equal weights, omit each signal in turn, then omit each eligible source from both current and reference windows.\n\nThese specified alternatives produce scores from **38 to 52**. The range is a sensitivity diagnostic, **not a confidence interval**. It does not test every modeling choice.\n\n## Inspect source exclusions\n\n- Without Agility Robotics43\n- Without Anthropic41\n- Without Black Forest Labs44\n- Without Boston Dynamics43\n- Without DeepMind44\n- Without Google AI44\n- Without Hacker News52\n- Without Hugging Face38\n- Without Mistral42\n- Without OpenAI48\n- Without Runway43\n- Without Stability AI43\n- Without Wayve43\n- Without World Labs41\n\nThe remaining corpus is re-baselined for each exclusion. Removing a source changes the population being described.\n\nThe observed corpus\n\n## A lens with visible limits.\n\nHacker News accounts for 80% of stored records. The corpus favors English-language, developer-facing coverage. Publisher posts, community attention and technical progress are different things.\n\n120 of 124 records in the current window belong to eligible sources. Eligibility uses declared coverage dates; it is not proof of complete collection. Historical points use retrospectively collected data.\n\n[Inspect the underlying headlines →](https://aifomoindex.com/feed)\n\n| Source composition · full corpus and current window |  |  | \n|---|---|---|\n| Source | All records | 7 days | \n|---|---|---|\n| Hacker News | 11,735 | 87 | \n| OpenAI | 1,032 | 13 | \n| Hugging Face | 761 | 7 | \n| Anthropic | 260 | 2 | \n| DeepMind | 190 | 2 | \n| Stability AI | 115 | 0 | \n| MidjourneyExcluded: short coverage | 94 | 1 | \n| Mistral | 83 | 1 | \n| Boston Dynamics | 72 | 1 | \n| Google AI | 58 | 2 | \n| Agility Robotics | 57 | 3 | \n| QwenExcluded: short coverage | 44 | 0 | \n| Wayve | 37 | 0 | \n| SunoExcluded: short coverage | 36 | 2 | \n| Black Forest Labs | 30 | 0 | \n| FigureExcluded: short coverage | 24 | 1 | \n| Runway | 24 | 1 | \n| World Labs | 18 | 1 | \n| DeepSeekExcluded: short coverage | 14 | 0 | \n| PikaExcluded: short coverage | 12 | 0 | \n\nSemantic annotations\n\nModel annotations · Not human-validated\n## Beyond counting.\n\nTesting semantic judgments.\n\nJev / System One annotates whether a headline concerns AI and whether it reports a concrete change. Each decision retains its probability distribution, model version and input fingerprint.\n\n14,696 current corpus records have model annotations in this snapshot. 6 carry provider-consistency flags. These annotations have zero index weight.\n\nHeadline judgments cannot establish real-world impact. Human annotation, held-out evaluation and calibration checks come before any proposal to change the index.\n\n[Read the experimental protocol →](https://aifomoindex.com/methodology#semantic-experiment)\n\nReproduce & contribute\n\n## A study you can inspect.\n\nMethod v1.1.0 · exploratory, not independently validated. Contributions can challenge source selection, audit relevance, propose a rubric or compare alternative specifications.\n\n[Contribute to the research →](https://github.com/mertguvencli/aifomoindex/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md)\n\nDataset SHA-256 · data/index.json\n\n`051464a66bec2f505192d80ca65d0772faf159fcfc5a624264d124ed281e47d4`\nFor citation, record the method version, observation date and repository commit. The snapshot includes fingerprints of data and implementation files. No DOI or peer-review status is claimed.\n\n## Latest14,696\n\n### Tuesday, Oct 6\n\n### Today\n\n[Powerless F1 drivers frustrated by Bahrain F1 software glitch](https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/horrible-totally-unacceptable-powerless-f1-drivers-frustrated-by-bahrain-f1-software-glitch/10861968/)\n\n### Yesterday\n\n[Homa: The end of TCP for AI clusters \\[video\\]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZ8WWZzoaR0)\n\n[Turn off Apple Intelligence on macOS 27 and get its disk space back](https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI)\n\n[What's the future for pure math research in the age of AI?](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/09/whats-the-future-for-pure-math-research-in-the-age-of-ai/)\n\n[Religious scholars met with Anthropic](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html)\n\n### Saturday, Oct 3\n\n[OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company's culture is 'broken'](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/03/openai-safety-leader-quits-warning-ai-companys-culture-is-broken)\n\n[We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare](https://blog.cloudflare.com/next-git-platform-on-cloudflare/)\n\n[Our AI Midwife](https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/our-ai-midwife)\n\n[Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 in Claude and Claude Code](https://claude.dev/blog/getting-the-most-out-of-opus-5-5/)\n\n[What Meta got right with Muse](https://metedata.substack.com/p/what-meta-got-right-with-muse)\n\nLoading older stories…", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-index-to-measure-ai-fomo", "canonical_source": "https://aifomoindex.com", "published_at": "2026-10-06 07:58:47+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-06 08:19:02.553549+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Hacker News", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Hugging Face", "DeepMind", "Stability AI", "Mistral", "Boston Dynamics"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-index-to-measure-ai-fomo", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-index-to-measure-ai-fomo.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-index-to-measure-ai-fomo.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-i-built-an-index-to-measure-ai-fomo.jsonld"}}