It will always be running my first local model and seeing its responses. A close second is watching the full thought traces of DeepSeek as this was and is still censored by major closed labs.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#412For me it was torrenting a 7G ball of weights leaked from Meta and running alpaca.cpp (an early variant of llama.cpp) on my desktop computer in early 2023. I started asking it questions about the Roman empire and it answered me in English! The responses were generally incorrect, but no worse than what your average American college student might guess at, though delivered with much more confidence. This was my desktop…
I did the same and it wa slow but realizd there was no going back. 100x improvement in three year
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#413For me the "oh shit" moment is when I realized that otherwise sane professionals, frequently in positions of authority, insist on taking these tools seriously. Zero thought put into any of the implications around unchecked anthropomorphism, security issues, employee knowledge retention, liability and other legal concerns, etc.
As an aside, i read this, gave you an upvote and then went to check your submission history and saw that I’d kick your rep over to 2222. Congrats!
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#414Being able to make large alterations to ffmpeg even though I'm a 2/10 C programmer.
The most impressive was speeding up the drawtext filter by at least 10x.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#415Gold medal @ the 2025 International Math Olympiad.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#416I tried to see if an LLM service provider could rewrite some legal docs where nothing was hallucinated in order to follow a consistent format to see what may be missing in the document. It could do that. Next, I wanted to see if this could be done with a local LLM. Gemma-4 handles this fine with an 8GB video card and a large context (128k). Next, I wanted to see if the model could also OCR these docs and translate th…
My son is in a lawsuit with his bank where they put through fraudulent charges and wouldn't charge them back then the bank sued him for the money. He is using Claude and Gemini fighting the original lawsuit and now has a counter-suit 100% using AI for everything. He puts it into different AI's to check everything against each other and to come up with more ideas. He started with ChatGPT, moved to Grok, then Claude, b…
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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#417I was working on a project for 2 years with about 5 engineers. It was many years before AI. It was new subject for our team, and we were pretty sure it was possible. Turned out it was not. Much later I asked AI if that kind of project is possible, and it immediately explained why it is not. Would have saved 2 years of our time...
Is it possible someone on the team published a blog post about why it wasn't possible? Or that otherwise the AI learned from your 5 years of effort? Some of the code made it on GitHub or something?
It's totally plausible that it didn't & it still got it right, I'm just curious.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#418[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#419[flagged]
Please don't post unsubstantive comments and especially please don't post them on the top comment in an active thread.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48418364.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#420I asked Claude to describe an app I was working on and it managed to describe the purpose of the app by looking only at implementation, no relevant docs in the repo. This was truly oh shit moment and I'm using AI assistance on that app since then.