My first ”oh shit” moment was in 2021 when using Neo GPT https://www.eleuther.ai/artifacts/gpt-neo to generate rewrites of texts. ”Holy shit it returns a 3 sentences text that sound human and kind of make sense”
We come a way from that…
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
701–710 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#702Several. Yesterday a friend with no prior coding experience or knowledge showed me an app he initially built to help him study for public administration job positions. The exams for this positions are public (spain), but the tools are scarce, expensive or he did not like. So he used lovable, then switched to web gemini and claude, then paid claude. He now has +130 very active users on an initial free tier, while he f…
So you're sending your students private data to Anthropic?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#703In 2017 I worked tirelessly with my colleagues to implement and replicate the first transformer paper. Yesterday I left Opus 4.8 to go do some architecture research, with GPU access. It replicated and trained a credible baseline. It implemented some ideas I'd been thinking about, and wrote custom CUDA kernels for them. It read and summarised dozens of related papers. It has since run dozens of experiments, with minim…
I'm assuming you saw this from yesterday:
https://www.anthropic.com/institute/recursive-self-improveme...
We are at the foot of a very sharp upward trajectory.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#704- Low stakes homelabs like automated watering sensors and small switches were rigged up properly wrt code and networking by the LLMs from 2-3 yrs ago. Months of fuddling and half-butting solved in an hour. Those tasks where I'm technical but not in that direction - easy now
- The real one: I'm an eng lead, think Head of X. That job is more about aggregating info across multiple sources, excel sheets, pdf proposals you dont want to write, how to figure out $500k for highly paid appsec engineers. Those multi-hour products of proscratination came together in minutes (goodbye PM jobs), 5/6x highly paid appsec jobs became 1-2x and a bunch of claude or ToB skills (goodbye some amount of eng staffing).
Writing is on the wall to me.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#705In 2017 I worked tirelessly with my colleagues to implement and replicate the first transformer paper. Yesterday I left Opus 4.8 to go do some architecture research, with GPU access. It replicated and trained a credible baseline. It implemented some ideas I'd been thinking about, and wrote custom CUDA kernels for them. It read and summarised dozens of related papers. It has since run dozens of experiments, with minim…
I've been doing the same. take papers, define a high level goal, then let it iterate. I have access to DGX boxes and watching the model rewrite stuff to take NVLink into account after it discovered it was great :-)
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#706The one I remember most is, when experimenting with Opus 3.5 for the first time, I asked it to generate a Firecracker backed local VM creation and management tool, something I'd wanted for a while but not found.
My expectation was that it might get something barely functional but would probably fail, and instead it generated a working piece of software which achieved a lot of what I wanted.
That definitely made me realise that, for at least some classes of software task this was a major change in how things could be done.
More recently when I can give the model a Local Privilege Escalation PoC in Linux and ask it to test whether it can be used for container breakout and then generate a working container breakout, all in one prompt... that definitely changes things.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#707Early on in my ChatGPT usage, one of my messages got interrupted/cut off (as happens occasionally).
My first thought was "oh they're going to need to add a UI feature to allow me to click and tell them to continue the conversation".
Then I realized I can just ask the model to continue, obviating the need for a button.
That was a pretty mind blowing moment.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#708[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#709It was when I realized that the collective ethics of humanity was so low that this was actually going to take off.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#710Several. Yesterday a friend with no prior coding experience or knowledge showed me an app he initially built to help him study for public administration job positions. The exams for this positions are public (spain), but the tools are scarce, expensive or he did not like. So he used lovable, then switched to web gemini and claude, then paid claude. He now has +130 very active users on an initial free tier, while he f…
> Now I have a local folder where I drop my 1 student list, with names and emails, 2 my loose notes, and 3 a qualification & feedback sheet model; then claude creates a sheet per student, formats and copies the feedback to the right sheet cell, waits for my corrections, then sends everything to their school emails
Yikes! Is this legal in your country?