Gwern talked about it when GPT 4.5 came out, a ton of breakthroughs with image and text AI came from anons trying to optimize models for their waifus. That's basically the origin of chat models in general - https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1izpgct/comment/mf5...
/g/ was also the home of a Windows XP source code leak (at least publicly). Some gaming-related leaks also came from /v/, such as the 1999 Duke Nukem Forever builds.
