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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?

#131

Post by mostlysimilar »

jgust wrote: post #128
mostlysimilar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is possibly a death spiral. GPT is only possible because it's been trained on the work humans have learned to do and then put out in the world. Now GPT is as good as them and will put them all out of work. How can it improve if the people who fed it are now jobless?

Presumably this problem is solved with technology improvements or the need is recognized to hire experts capable of generating high quality training material. In either situation, there's going to be extreme discomfort.

GPT is good because of collective knowledge, lots of data. What do you have in mind by "hire experts"? Isn't that what we have now? Many experts in many fields, hired to do their work. Cut this number down and you reduce training data.

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

#132

Post by yawnxyz »

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.

As much as I'd wish to say "you're wrong, people care about intelligent, passionate people who do great work, not PhDs" you're right about much of the work out there.

We've tried many time to work with CSIRO (the NSF of Australia) and it's fallen flat. They love impressive resumes and nothing else. I'm having a chat with their "Director of ML" who's never heard of the words "word2vec" or "pytorch" before. (And I'm a UX designer!)

I think at most corporate firms you'll end up running into more resume stuffers than people who actually know how to use ML tools.

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

#133

Post by yoyohello13 »

jgust wrote: post #128
mostlysimilar wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is possibly a death spiral. GPT is only possible because it's been trained on the work humans have learned to do and then put out in the world. Now GPT is as good as them and will put them all out of work. How can it improve if the people who fed it are now jobless?

Presumably this problem is solved with technology improvements or the need is recognized to hire experts capable of generating high quality training material. In either situation, there's going to be extreme discomfort.

There is a problem, how will people become experts in the field. If all entry level positions are taken by AI, nobody will be able to become an expert.

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

#135

Post by csa »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #119

Wow - this is just wild. I've seen lots of arguments around "AI won't take everyone's job, it will just open up new areas for new jobs." Even if you take that with the benefit of the doubt (which I don't really think is warranted): 1. You don't need to take everyone's job. You just need to take a shitload of people's jobs. I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality,…

> I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality, etc.,

I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality?

Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared profits more widely due to benevolence (it happens), government edict (e.g., ww2 era), or social/political pressure (e.g., post-war boom).

Fwiw, I think that the mid-20th century build up of the middle class was an anomaly (sadly), and perhaps we are just reverting to the norm in terms of capital class and worker class extremes.

I see tons of super skilled folks still getting financially fucked by the capital class simply because there is no real option other than to try to attempt to become part of the capital class.

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

#136

Post by JamesAdir »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #119

Wow - this is just wild. I've seen lots of arguments around "AI won't take everyone's job, it will just open up new areas for new jobs." Even if you take that with the benefit of the doubt (which I don't really think is warranted): 1. You don't need to take everyone's job. You just need to take a shitload of people's jobs. I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality,…

You are a founder of a startup. A notable VC wants to invest millions of dollars but insists that the contract will be in their language which is Finnish. Would you trust GPT to translate the contract or reach out to a professional human translator? We've got Google translate from 2006, and there are still millions of translators at work all around the world. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss those jobs.

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

#137

Post by famouswaffles »

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.

Tested these before GPT4 but 100%, Bi/Multi-lingual LLMs are the key to solving Machine Translation.

https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...

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

#139

Post by yoyohello13 »

twawaaay wrote: post #42

I think education goal for people shifted. I teach my kids to be flexible and embrace the change. Invest in abilities that transfer well to various things you could be doing during your life. Be a problem solver. In the future -- forget about cosy job you can be doing for the rest of your life. You no longer have any guarantees even if you own the business and even if you are farmer. What you absolutely don't want is…

Really the only safe career in the moderate future is going to be manual labor. There is always need to send a bunch of humans into the middle of nowhere to dig ditches.

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

#140

Post by [deleted] »

csa wrote: post #135
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #119

Wow - this is just wild. I've seen lots of arguments around "AI won't take everyone's job, it will just open up new areas for new jobs." Even if you take that with the benefit of the doubt (which I don't really think is warranted): 1. You don't need to take everyone's job. You just need to take a shitload of people's jobs. I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality,…

> I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality, etc., I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality? Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared profits more wide…

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