Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
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Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#2It does seem like the (misnamed because it’s not open) OpenAI is very far ahead of most other efforts, especially at the edges in areas like instruction training and output filtering.
Playing with Llama 65G gave me a sense for what the median raw effort is probably like. It seems to take a lot of work to fine tune and harness these systems and get them reliably producing useful output.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#3I tried translating something from English to German (my native language) yesterday with ChatGPT4 and compared it to Microsoft Translate, Google Translate and DeepL.
My ranking:
1. ChatGPT4 - flawless translation. I was blown away
2. DeepL - very close, but one mistake
3. Google Translate - good translation, some mistakes
4. Microsoft Translate - bad translation, many mistakes
I can understand the panic.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#4As one of the comments on reddit posts - it's not just big tech companies, but also entire university teams which feel the goalposts moving miles ahead all of a sudden. Imagine working on your PhD on chat bots since start of 2022. Your entire PhD topic might be irrelevant already...
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#5If you were an NLP researcher at a university whose past years of experience is facing existential threat due to this rapid innovation causing your area to become obsolete, what would be some good areas to pivot to or refocus on?
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#6As one of the comments on reddit posts - it's not just big tech companies, but also entire university teams which feel the goalposts moving miles ahead all of a sudden. Imagine working on your PhD on chat bots since start of 2022. Your entire PhD topic might be irrelevant already...
>Imagine working on your PhD on chat bots since start of 2022. Your entire PhD topic might be irrelevant already...
In fairness most PhD topics people work on these days, outside of the select few top research universities in the world, are obsolete before they begin. At least from what my friends in the field tell me.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#7This is imo a wake-up call about the value of having "AI teams" embedded in companies.
Bad analogy- if you had an integrated circuit team in your product company building custom CPUs and Intel came out with the 8080 (or whatever was the first modern commercial chip), probably time to disband the org and use the commercial tech
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#8If you were an NLP researcher at a university whose past years of experience is facing existential threat due to this rapid innovation causing your area to become obsolete, what would be some good areas to pivot to or refocus on?
Get out of academia and into industry.
Why the hell stay in in academia? This is clearly the next technological wave, and you shouldn't sleep on it. Especially when you're so well positioned to take advantage of your experience. You can make $500,000/yr (maybe more with all the new startups and options) and be on the bleeding edge.
If you want to go back to academia later, you can comfortably do so. Most don't, but that doesn't mean it isn't an option.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#9If you were an NLP researcher at a university whose past years of experience is facing existential threat due to this rapid innovation causing your area to become obsolete, what would be some good areas to pivot to or refocus on?
NLP is nowhere near being solved.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#10I tried translating something from English to German (my native language) yesterday with ChatGPT4 and compared it to Microsoft Translate, Google Translate and DeepL. My ranking: 1. ChatGPT4 - flawless translation. I was blown away 2. DeepL - very close, but one mistake 3. Google Translate - good translation, some mistakes 4. Microsoft Translate - bad translation, many mistakes I can understand the panic.
Fellow German here. Funny thing about DeepL: It translates "pathetisch" as "pathetic". For example: "Das war eine pathetische Rede." -> "That was a pathetic speech."
I guess we have to get used to software redefining the meaning of words. It was kind of funny when that happened regarding Google Maps / neighborhood names, but with LLMs it's a different ballgame.