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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?

#11

Post by simonh »

bippingchip wrote: post #4

As 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...

I'm not too worried about that. We don't actually understand fully how LLMs function internally, so research on how language works and how to process it is still useful in advancing our understanding. It may not lead to products that can compete with GPT, but PhDs aren't about commercialisation, they're about advancing human knowledge.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#12

Post by echelon »

bippingchip wrote: post #4

As 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...

All these people don't understand how hireable and desirable they are now. They need to get out of academia and plugged into AI positions at tech companies and startups.

Their value just went up tremendously, even if their PhD thesis got cancelled.

Easily millionaires waiting to happen.

---

edit: Can't respond to child comment due to rate limit, so editing instead.

> That is not how it works at all.

Speak for yourself. I'm hiring folks off 4chan, and they're kicking ass with pytorch and can digest and author papers just fine.

People stopped caring about software engineering and data science degrees in the late 2010's.

People will stop caring about AI/ML PhDs as soon as the challenge to hire talent hits - and it will hit this year.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#13

Post by Yoric »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #6
bippingchip wrote: post #4

As 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.

Anecdata of one: I finished my PhD about 20 years ago in programming language theory. I created something innovative but not revolutionary. Given how slowly industry is catching up on my domain, it will probably take another 20-30 years before something similarly powerful makes it into an industrial programming language.

Counter-anecdata of one: On the other hand, one of the research teams of which I've been a member after my PhD was basically inventing Linux containers (in competition with other teams). Industry caught up pretty quickly on that. Still, academia arrived first.

edit Rephrased to decrease pedantism.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#14

Post by pohuing »

davidktr wrote: post #10
davidkuennen wrote: post #3

I 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.

Pathetic can mean emotional in English as well. Though I only discovered that by reading the dictionary.

For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#15

Post by sinuhe69 »

davidktr wrote: post #10
davidkuennen wrote: post #3

I 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.

I think we should not undervalue DeepL. Not only its default-translation is already very good, it allows users to select different alternatives and remember these preferences, too. Which is not possible, at least not easy with GPT.

And as with anything else, with the time it will get improved, too. LLM is not the answer to all linguistic problems.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#16

Post by mach1ne »

tokai wrote: post #9
oars wrote: post #5

If 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.

Depending on definition, it is solved.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#17

Post by martindbp »

Not big tech (or PhD level research), but half the work I did on my side project (subtitles for Chinese learning/OCR) is sort of obsolete now, most of the rest of it within a year or two. I put months into an NLP pipeline to segment Chinese sentences, classifying pinyin and translating words in-context, something ChatGPT is great at out the box. My painstaking heuristic for determining show difficulty using word frequencies and comparing distributions to children's shows is now the simple task of giving part of the transcript and asking ChatGPT how difficult it is. Next up, the OCR I did will probably be solved by ChatGPT4. It seems the writing is on the wall: most tasks on standard media (text/images/video), will be "good enough" for non-critical use. The only remaining advantage of bespoke solutions is speed and cost and that will also be a fleeting advantage.

But it's also extremely exciting, we'll be able to build really great things very easily, and focus our efforts elsewhere. Today anyone can throw together a language learning tutor to rival Duolingo. As long as you're in it for solving problems you shouldn't be too threatened by whatever tool set you're currently becoming obsolete.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#18

Post by djous »

During my master's degree in data science, we had several companies visit our faculty to recruit students. Not a single one was a specialized NLP company, but many of them had NLP projects going on.

Most of those projects were the usual "solution looking for a problem to solve". Even those projects that might have had _some_ utility, would have been way more effective to buy/license a product than to develop an in-house solution. Because really, what's the use of throwing a dozen 25-30 years old with non-specialized knowledge, when there are companies full of guys with PhDs in NLP that devote all their resources to NLP? Yeah, you can pipe together some python, but these kind of products will always be subpar and more expensive long-term than just buying a proper solution from a specialized company.

To me it was pretty clear that those projects were just PR so that c-levels could sell how they were preparing their company for a digital world. Can't say I'm sorry for all the people working on those non-issues though. From the attitude of recruiters and employees, you'd think they were about to find a cure for cancer. Honestly, I can't wait for GPT and other productivity tools to wrech havock upon the tech labour market. Some people in tech really need to be taken down a notch or two.

Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?

#19

Post by oldgradstudent »

simonh wrote: post #11
bippingchip wrote: post #4

As 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...

I'm not too worried about that. We don't actually understand fully how LLMs function internally, so research on how language works and how to process it is still useful in advancing our understanding. It may not lead to products that can compete with GPT, but PhDs aren't about commercialisation, they're about advancing human knowledge.

> We don't actually understand fully

A touch of understatement.

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