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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?

#31

Post by IanCal »

gonzo41 wrote: post #30
gattilorenz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're using the wrong definition, then. /s Where is some evidence that NLP is 'solved'? What does it even mean? OpenAI itself acknowledges the fundamental limitations of ChatGPT and the method of training it, but apparently everybody is happily sweeping them under the rug: "ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training,…

It'd be great if GPT could provide it's sources for the text it generated. I've been asking it about lyrics from songs that I know of, but where I can't find the original artist listed. I was hoping chat gpt had consumed a stack of lyrics and I could just ask it, "What song has this chorus or one similar to X..." It didn't work. Instead it firmly stated the wrong answer. And when I gave it time ranges it just noped o…

Have you tried bing chat? That search & sourcing is exactly what it does.

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

#32

Post by gonzo41 »

IanCal wrote: post #31
gonzo41 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be great if GPT could provide it's sources for the text it generated. I've been asking it about lyrics from songs that I know of, but where I can't find the original artist listed. I was hoping chat gpt had consumed a stack of lyrics and I could just ask it, "What song has this chorus or one similar to X..." It didn't work. Instead it firmly stated the wrong answer. And when I gave it time ranges it just noped o…

Have you tried bing chat? That search & sourcing is exactly what it does.

Not yet, I'll try at work on my windows box. Thanks.

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

#33

Post by epups »

Everyone here is saying that people can simply transition easily into startups and other big companies. To a certain extent that's true, but what exactly are they going to do? As technology consolidates into one or two major LLM's, likely only accessible by API, I feel most orgs would be better served by relying heavily on finetuning or optimizing those for their purpose. Previous experience with NLP certainly helps with that, although this type of work would not necessarily be as exciting as trying to build the next big thing, which everyone was scrambling for before.

OpenAI could build a state-of-the-art tool with a few hundred developers - to me, that means that money will converge to them and other big orgs rather than the opposite.

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

#34

Post by epups »

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.

I'm actually not sure what will become of tools like DeepL. Whatever edge they may have with dataset tuning and other tricks under the hood are likely superseded by a better architecture, which in turn requires a ton of capital to train. By the time they come up with a GPT4 equivalent, we will be using GPT5.

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

#35

Post by osigurdson »

djous wrote: post #18

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-ho…

>> "solution looking for a problem to solve"

I wonder if this is a bad as everyone thinks. When a new technology arrives which is not completely understood, isn't the right approach to try to find some applications for it? Sure, most will fail, but some valid use cases will likely emerge.

I'm pretty sure almost all technologies at some point were solutions looking for a problem to solve. Examples include the internet, the computer and math.

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

#36

Post by groffee »

zirgs wrote: post #21
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.

Does it translate hate speech too?

"In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."

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

#37

Post by sgt101 »

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...

Perhaps - but normally you'll have a narrowly defined and very specific technical topic/hypothesis that you're working on, and many/most of these aren't going to be closed off by ChatGPT4

Will this effect the job market (both academic and commercial) for these folks? It's very hard to say. Clearly lots of value will be generated by the new generation of models. There will be a lot of catchup and utilisation work where people will want to have models in house and with specific features that the hyperscale models don't have (for example constrained training sets). I'm wondering how many commercial illustrators have had their practices disrupted by Stable Diffusion? Will the same dynamics (what ever they are) apply for the use of LLM's?

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

#38

Post by davidkuennen »

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.

The most amazing thing about ChatGPT translation is, that you can even instruct it how to translate. For example "dutzen" and "sietzen" in German. I just simply tell it how it should do it and it did. Absolutely amazing. It's like actually working with a real translator.

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

#39

Post by piva00 »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #28
echelon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That's an odd reason to want this.

Less bullshit jobs. Society needs doctors, nurses, plumbers and teachers not tech bros.

Society definitely needs those, but the incentives of the system most societies live under do not align to those needs. We are 100% into a society of wants, not needs, and the rewards are for those who sell stuff for these wants. Our needs went into the "cost center" of society's calculation, not an investment, and so it's been a race to the bottom for those professions.

While adtech, crypto and other bullshit gets massive funding because it can turn a profit.

The incentives to have a good society don't align with the incentives of financial capitalism.

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

#40

Post by matthewdgreen »

echelon wrote: post #8
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?

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 t…

If you go into industry you’ll be given a chance to deploy these models and rush them into products. You’ll also make good money. If you go into academia (or research, whether it’s in academia or industry) you’ll be given the chance to try to understand what they’re doing. I can see the appeal of making money and rushing products out. But it wouldn’t even begin to compete with my curiosity. Makes me wish I was younger and could start my research career over.

ETA: And though it may take longer, people who understand these models will eventually be in possession of the most valuable skill there is. Perhaps one of the last valuable human skills, if things go a certain direction.

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