For me it was the original DALL-E project page.
Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
751–760 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#752when my friend cloned my voice rvc or something model from github and was creating bad songs, it was funny but GOD DAMN i got called into HoDs office for that
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#753Kind of peculiar and memorable story for me.
I was on the couch on my Nintendo Switch, playing around with ChatGPT 3 and asked it where to find a specific item in Zelda Breath of the Wild. When it provided a coherent answer I was just dumbfounded. To be fair, the answer was semi-hallucinated but partly true. But it made me realize what kind of breakthrough it must be for some program to provide an answer to this without searching external sources (which it couldn't do yet). Such a small data point, like a drop in the vast sea of human knowledge space.
Prompted me to do some back on the envelope calculation. The weights of this model were a few hundred GBs. I just realized what kind of quantum leap it was to compress this seemingly infinite knowledge space into a few GB of weights.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#754Earlier quoted context omitted.
This can be a product.
Going from one off prototype to robust product is a huge leap. I think these ephemeral context tailored projects are really great and useful. But these are not to be thought of as products. They work for you specifically, and people who are tech-brained enough to be able to formulate the complex requirements into a coherent prompt are not like the average user you'd have to sell a product to. It's much easier to make…
a 3 or 9X leap if you listen to Fred Brooks
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#755Kind of peculiar and memorable story for me. I was on the couch on my Nintendo Switch, playing around with ChatGPT 3 and asked it where to find a specific item in Zelda Breath of the Wild. When it provided a coherent answer I was just dumbfounded. To be fair, the answer was semi-hallucinated but partly true. But it made me realize what kind of breakthrough it must be for some program to provide an answer to this with…
How is that result any different than what you would have done without AI, which is likely a search for the item name which would have given you a wiki about it and videos on how to get it? Why were you amazed at what, on any other day, is a common query? Really just that it was offline?
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
possibly not or grey area under GDPR if I use identifiable information, as it is sent to Anthropic for processing, no matter if used for training or not, but I am unsure about this, I should probably anonymize and research it more, thanks for pointing it out
Sorry to tell you but it’s not grey area, it’s full on black. You do not have permission to share such data with a third party provider that doesn’t have strict privacy guarantees and that you have a data processing agreement with. TOS are not sufficient.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#757Not sure, but I can tell you what my "oh s** astroturfing is so bad, it's even in Hacker News" moment. And if I learned GenAI was used to make some of the astroturf, that's more an "ah s* “ than an "oh s* “ thing. I mean, the prominence, ubiquity, and breathlessness. One out of three, sure. Two out of three, maybe. And some corpo shilling definitely happens here. But this is like, well, covering an entire area with a…
FWIW the OP passes as 100% human in Pangram https://www.pangram.com/history/d33dcbcd-e82b-4ce0-bea5-e4ee... Reddit is definitely overtaken with astroturf at this point. Especially in any subreddit where there is any kind of business interest in doing so.
Lets be honest, a lot of people are getting called out constantly on reddit who invent stuff.
Its still annoyingly addictive but its half story telling and half bubble with a sprinkle of porn and niche interests.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#758[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#759Not sure, but I can tell you what my "oh s** astroturfing is so bad, it's even in Hacker News" moment. And if I learned GenAI was used to make some of the astroturf, that's more an "ah s* “ than an "oh s* “ thing. I mean, the prominence, ubiquity, and breathlessness. One out of three, sure. Two out of three, maybe. And some corpo shilling definitely happens here. But this is like, well, covering an entire area with a…
My "oh sh* moment" with GenAI is ongoing and is watching all the correlated financials unwind when TSMC said "we can only support so much"[1]. Very few things in life experience exponential growth and assembled systems don't often stay that way if they don't become sigmoidal. ie its exponential and end is nigh xor its exponential then sigmoidal xor linear. Also a bit hilarious to believe that a single 3 month cycle a…
But it would still be very ignorant to just not follow it very very closely and take it serious if something throws a lot of signals like AI and Robotics does.
We are in 2026, supply chains are highly optimized which means we could make and deliver a lot of robots in a relative short period of time.
We also have solved all fundamental issues we had 20 years ago like communication thanks to the internet, translation and co.
We know have a system, which can be copy and pasted and run in parallel with a snap of a finger.
If (and this If is not that crazy) some breakthrough happens tomorrow, this can be used the day after tomorrow.
I currently say that it could become very very interesting in 5-15 years. I still follow AI very closely and i do not have the feeling anything is slowing down.
And independent of something happening, a lot of people did not find jobs due to this AI investment, a lot of jobs already disappeared too.
Re: Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?
#760In 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…
Yeah i find it very ignorant, at the current state to assume exponential growth etc. is all fantasy and everything is just hype.
I think its more like driving very fast, keeping an eye very close to the road and not knowing if there is a speed limit ahead very soon or not.