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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?

#161

Post by WalterBright »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #123
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,…

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?

Imagine the devastation wrought by automatic looms, that put all the weavers out of a job!

97% of jobs used to be working on the farm. Now it's something like 2%.

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

#162

Post by throwayyy479087 »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #139
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.

https://grist.org/energy/electrician-shortage-electrify-ever...

Extremely relevant story

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

#163

Post by stonogo »

meany wrote: post #88
JKCalhoun wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 am…

It's evidence of resentment, but not of well reasoned discourse against something the tech industry is doing. Characterizations like this anthropomorphize a group into a single entity that is easier to hate and assign intentions, too. It's not constructive to any conversation that moves a discussion forward. A person who is mad at "tech bros" is likely more upset about systemic forces that they want to blame on a tar…

Comparing affluent ivory-tower digital landlords to vulnerable people being blamed for things outside their control is definitely one of the decisions of all time. It also seems like a lot of exercise just to feel justified in discarding a large group of opinions.

People start generalizing about groups like this when they've stopped caring about negative policy consequences which affect those groups. Politicians who blame wage stagnation on immigrants do not expect to have those immigrants who gain citizenship vote for them. Why do you think people might have stopped caring what happens to the group designated "tech bros"?

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

#164

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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…

> the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing.

In the current world, where do you think a lot of the capital class is able to get their capital?

Technological progress, and especially the Internet, has made much bigger markets out of what were previously lots of little markets, and now th "winner take all/most" dynamics make it so that where you previously could have, for example, lots of "winners" in every city (e.g. local newspapers selling classified ads), where now Google, FB and Amazon gobble up most ad dollars - I think someone posted that Amazon's ad business alone is bigger than all US (maybe more than that?) newspaper ad businesses.

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

#165

Post by nothrowaways »

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.

Only If you want to keep doing it the old lematization way.

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

#166

Post by xp84 »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #123
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,…

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 it will improve the same way humans did -- once it's roughly on par with us it'll be just as capable of innovating and trying new things. The only difference is that for humans, trying a truly new approach to something isn't really done that often by most. "GPT-9" might regularly and automatically try recomputing all the "tricky problems" it remembers from the past with updated models, or with a few tweaked parameters and then analyze whether any of these experiments provided "better" solutions. And it might do this operation during all idle cycles continuously.

Honestly as a human who grasps how the economy works, this doesn't sound like a good thing, but I don't see any path to trying the fundamental changes that would be required for really good general AI to not be an absolute Depression generator.

The only thing I'm wondering is, will the wealthiest ones, who actually have any power to influence these fundamental thing, figure this out before it's too late? I really doubt your Musks and Bezoses would enjoy living out their lives on ring-fenced compounds or remote islands while the rest of the world devolves into the Hunger Games.

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

#167

Post by psychphysic »

dogcomplex wrote: post #153
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,…

It is very obvious there is a mass unemployment wave coming - or at least a mass "retraining" wave, though the new jobs "teaching AIs" or whatever remain to be seen. I hope everyone currently just questioning whether this will happen now is prepared to state it with conviction in the coming months and fight for some sort of social protection program for all these displaced people, because the profits from this new wo…

If not unemployment and retraining then a lot of people are going to need to miraculously become better at their jobs.

I somehow imagine it'll be the worst of both worlds but I'm a glass half empty kind of guy.

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

#168

Post by karpierz »

osigurdson wrote: post #80
72deluxe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The computer was always designed to be a computational machine. It didn't just appear and then someone thought "what could I actually use this for?" Also the Internet came out of DARPA which was a method of sharing data between geographically remote military facilities. It wasn't like they wired up devices and thought "what could we use this for?".

Do you assert that we had a good understanding of all of the problems that a computer could solve before making it? This seems absurd to me.

GPs point is that the technologies you've mentioned solved real problems before they were adapted for different use cases. They didn't make Darpanet and then think "man, if only there was some use for this" until the Internet came along. They designed it to send signals between distant nodes while being resilient to individual nodes being nuked.

Only after DARPAnet solved that problem did it get adapted to some other problems (ex: how do I send cat pictures to people)?

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

dserban wrote: post #103

The PR folks at my current company are in full panic mode on Linkedin, judging from the passive-aggressive tone of their posts (sometimes very nearly begging customers not to use ChatGPT and friends). They fully understand that LLMs are stealing lunch money from established information retrieval industry players selling overpriced search algorithms. For a long time, my company was deluded about being protected by ins…

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by craftyguy98 »

dserban wrote: post #103

The PR folks at my current company are in full panic mode on Linkedin, judging from the passive-aggressive tone of their posts (sometimes very nearly begging customers not to use ChatGPT and friends). They fully understand that LLMs are stealing lunch money from established information retrieval industry players selling overpriced search algorithms. For a long time, my company was deluded about being protected by ins…

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