The moment when I ran llama on my old gaming PC (using something called ChatGPT4All) was my "oh shit" moment: I was now talking... to my PC.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
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Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#32I feel like with the hype cycle and constant publishing of sketchy claims that I pretty much daily have an "oh shit" moment followed by a "nope, everything is about the same" moment. It's frankly exhausting. It's hard for me to recall a subject that has irritated me as much over a period of years, and it's barely even about AI itself but instead just feeling harassed with the constant anxiety and rage baiting.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#33When none of the models, STOA or not, could answer any genuinely interesting question. All models could regurgitate was has been expressed before but nothing actually new was there, until explicitly asked for, and even then it required filtering through potentially so much noise it was practically not interesting anymore as it required all the knowledge to validate or invalidate the claims. That's when, few years ago…
Related but distinct, few years later I asked an acquaintance to ask a question to a model. I didn't want to bias the test so I ask them to ask whatever they wanted. They asked "What time is it in Sri Lanka?" which I thought was a funny question. I predicted it wouldn't work because it was asked to an offline model so I thought it wouldn't manage to get current data. Still, I didn't interfere and we watch the answer…
"I googled 'what is my bank balance' and it couldn't even tell me. What a waste of resources."
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#34One of our SAAS providers launched an AI agent enabled version, and it can follow direction and do tasks & manipulate data/settings in the software like on par with a below average person. When I used it I had a sinking feeling, tons of teams and people will be redundant as these agents improve and roll out to other software.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#35I remember a couple months after ChatGPT came out I was in a 1-1 with a coworker who hadn’t really played around with it much. I was very much toying around with it and was surprised at how good at stuff it was. I wanted to show him it was for real, he was skeptical, so over a half hour we had it make a bee and a flower buzz around in d3, copying and pasting between jsfiddle and ChatGPT. By the end of it, we had a nice animation and were both throughly surprised that the computers could code so well now.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#36I had a locally hosted model write its own semantic search system that indexed 250,000 documentation and code files and then write a fully functioning mod for one of the games I play based on that documentation that I couldn't get to work after 2 weeks of my own effort, all in under 4 hours (and that included a 25 minute long indexing process). This freaked me out enough that I then had it write a CLI based activity and TODO tracker and then integrate that tool into its coding process to track all of its activities in about another 2 hours. I am still emotionally recovering from this day. I have since replaced the semantic search system with an open source option (though I used it for a few months) but I still use the activity tracker for both coding projects and myself.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#37So many. First was when I saw GPT-2 create jokes that were original and kinda funny.
Most recent: I use Claude Code and have a convention where I grant various levels of autonomy during a session. I got bored recently and just let it keep running with an empty issues queue, essentially telling it to do whatever it wanted.
It did a bunch of repo cleanup, then it kept suggesting to end the session, but I just kept giving it autonomy prompts.
It started a creative writing public repo and wrote a bunch of stories, essays, and poems. I did not prompt it, at all, to do that. Some of what it wrote is quite good (IMHO).
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#38The first SORA release truly scared me. The uncanny valley of simulating life like this still creeps me out to this day.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#39I feel like with the hype cycle and constant publishing of sketchy claims that I pretty much daily have an "oh shit" moment followed by a "nope, everything is about the same" moment. It's frankly exhausting. It's hard for me to recall a subject that has irritated me as much over a period of years, and it's barely even about AI itself but instead just feeling harassed with the constant anxiety and rage baiting.
I felt the same way, then I started with "I'll believe it when I see it". Now I'm a bit happier.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#40When it started being forced on me in tools I was already using begrudgingly.