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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?

#61

Post by JKCalhoun »

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.

I agree with your sentiment but disagree that AI research is in any way the domain of tech bros.

I’m starting to see the term “tech bros” appear more and more in HN - before hand I more frequently saw it outside of this site.

Some people on HN I have seen really come down on those that use the term. I don’t.

Perhaps those of us in the industry ought to recognize that the term exists because of a growing resentment among people outside of the tech industry.

Your comment hints too as to why that is.

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

#62

Post by Technotroll »

goethes_kind wrote: post #41
echelon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yoursel…

That is not how it works at all. You won't get hired if you don't have the academic pedigree in the first place. That means a completed Ph.D and good publications in good journals.

Sorry, that's patently untrue. Perhaps it's anecdotal, but I know a host of undergrads who got head hunted into quite elite tech positions either directly from Uni where I studied, or due to private projects they were in. And I even know a few that doesn't even have any uni edu that got hired to very high technical positions. Usually they were nerdy types who had worked with or had exposure to large systems for whatever reason, or who showed some promise due to previous work, demos or programs they'd made. But sure, most people have to go the edu route. It's the safest way into tech, as you are - at least in principle - fully vetted before you apply. Thinking that you can get a data science or hacker job just by installing Kali is ofc also very untrue.

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

#63

Post by goethes_kind »

Yoric wrote: post #59
goethes_kind wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how it works at all. You won't get hired if you don't have the academic pedigree in the first place. That means a completed Ph.D and good publications in good journals.

Hired in academia? Sure. Hired in industry. That's the opposite. I've had a friend who had to hide that they had a PhD to be hired...

I guess we are living in two different universes. Any job ad for an ML role or ML adjacent role says Ph.d required or Ph.d preferable. Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany.

For a plain SWE role a Ph.d might be a disadvantage here too, but for anything ML related it is mandatory from what I can see.

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

#64

Post by TMWNN »

Is the entire field of data science (Itself maybe a decade old in terms of being a college major?) now obsolete, in terms of being a distinct job field? Are all data science majors now going to be "just" coming up with the proper prompts to get GPT to correctly massage datasets?

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

#65

Post by goethes_kind »

Technotroll wrote: post #62
goethes_kind wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how it works at all. You won't get hired if you don't have the academic pedigree in the first place. That means a completed Ph.D and good publications in good journals.

Sorry, that's patently untrue. Perhaps it's anecdotal, but I know a host of undergrads who got head hunted into quite elite tech positions either directly from Uni where I studied, or due to private projects they were in. And I even know a few that doesn't even have any uni edu that got hired to very high technical positions. Usually they were nerdy types who had worked with or had exposure to large systems for whate…

I think my post is more representative of the truth than yours. I am sure you are telling the truth, but these unique talents you are talking about are not representative of the bulk of people working in research.

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

#66

Post by tpoacher »

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.

take it from me; "doc bros" are far, far worse.

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

#67

Post by hnbad »

hnfong wrote: post #53
hnbad wrote: post #26

When I was studying Computational Linguistics I kept running into the unspoken question: given that Google Translate already exists, what is even the point of all of this? We were learning all these ideas about how to model natural language and tag parts of speech using linguistic theory so we could eventually discover that utopian solution that would let us feed two language models into a machine to make it perfectl…

I learnt some very basics of computational linguistics since it was related to a side project. I kept wondering why people were spending huge amounts of resources into tagging and labelling corpora of thousands of words, while to me it seems that in theory it should be possible to feed wikipedia (of a certain language) into a program and have it spit out some statistically correct rules about words and grammar. I gue…

I think a huge part is that computational linguistics still chases the idea of a universal language model, which may simply not be possible. I haven't followed the science in general linguistics but something feels off when most of the information ends up being tagged onto nil particles (i.e. parts of speech present neither in utterances nor written language and not affecting intonation or otherwise being detectable except by contrasting the structure with related languages).

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

#68

Post by echelon »

goethes_kind wrote: post #65
Technotroll wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, that's patently untrue. Perhaps it's anecdotal, but I know a host of undergrads who got head hunted into quite elite tech positions either directly from Uni where I studied, or due to private projects they were in. And I even know a few that doesn't even have any uni edu that got hired to very high technical positions. Usually they were nerdy types who had worked with or had exposure to large systems for whate…

I think my post is more representative of the truth than yours. I am sure you are telling the truth, but these unique talents you are talking about are not representative of the bulk of people working in research.

(My posting rate limit went away)

The demand for AI/ML will fast outstrip available talent. We'll be pulling students right out of undergrad if they can pass an interview.

I'm hiring folks off Reddit and 4chan that show an ability to futz with PyTorch and read papers.

Also, from your sibling comment:

> Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany.

Huge factor. US cares about getting work done and little else. Titles are honestly more trouble than they're worth and you sometimes see negative selection for them in software engineering. I suspect this will bleed over into AI/ML in ten years.

Work and getting it done is what matters. If someone has an aptitude for doing a task, it doesn't matter where it came from. If they can get along with your team, do the work, learn on the job and grow, bring them on.

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

#69

Post by laserlight »

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.

AI or technology won't reduce bullshit jobs. To the contrary, they might increase bullshit jobs, because there would be more resources to allocate for those jobs.

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

#70

Post by harimau777 »

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.

Two problems: Who is going to pay to retrain people for those jobs?

Except for perhaps doctors (and even then residency is BS) all of those jobs are treated or paid like crap.

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