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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?

#201

Post by seydor »

qwerty3344 wrote: post #185
jurassic wrote: post #180

Maybe this is alarmist, but I don't see how LLMs don't collapse our entire economic system over the next decade or so. This is coming for all of us, not just the NLP experts in big company research groups. Being able to cheaply/instantly perform virtually any task is great until you realize there is now nobody left to buy your product or service because the entire middle class has been put out of work by LLMs. And th…

There are entire sectors of the economy that LLMs can't touch - hospitality, manufacturing, caregivers, religious sectors, live-action entertainment, etc. Sure some of these will be replaced by robots but there will always be new jobs too.

white collar workers detest these jobs

the only reason they studied, went to university etc was to avoid doing manual labour. this has been happening for decades, a century. they ll be depressed

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

#202

Post by timoth3y »

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,…

The problem is not that automation will eliminate our jobs.

The problem is that we have created an economy where that is a bad thing.

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

#203

Post by emptysongglass »

izacus wrote: post #142
belter wrote: post #78

A whole thread on AI experts discussing how AI is making them obsolete...back to gardening...

This fad too shall pass. And the tech will end up where it always does: helping some, changing some but nowhere near as much as the gold rush profiteers would make you believe.

This is not an event that calls for pithy adages. The fruits of ML are not a fad just like personal computing was not a fad. It's a watershed event that cuts across every knowledge worker's domain. If you're not currently using these LLMs it may not be obvious to you but those of us that have tried to apply them to our current fields see huge gains in productivity. Just in my own little slice of knowledge work, I've seen yield increases that have saved me multiple days of work on a single project.

Everyone is going to feel this, most prominently people in the sorts of industries that frequent HN. If you haven't yet, you will or you will be forced to when you discover everyone in your field is out-producing you armed with these tools.

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

#204

Post by 1attice »

WalterBright wrote: post #161
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?

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%.

This hoary take irks me. There were still places for human endeavour to go when the looms were automated.

That is no longer the case.

Think of it instead as cognitive habitat. Sure, there has been habitat loss in the past, but those losses have been offset by habitat gains elsewhere.

This time, I don't see anywhere for habitat gains to come, and I see a massive, enormous, looming (ha!) cognitive habitat loss.

-- EDIT:

Reply to reply, posted as edit because I hit the HN rate limit:

> Your job didn't exist then. Mine didn't, either.

Yes, that was my point. New habitat opened up. I infer (but cannot prove) that the same will not be true this time. At the least, the newly-created habitat (prompt engineer, etc.) will be miniscule compared to what has been lost.

Reasoning from historical lessons learned during the introduction of TNT was of course tried when nuclear arms were created as well. Yet lessons from the TNT era proved ineffective at describing the world that was ushered into being. Firebombing, while as destructive as a small nuclear warhead, was hard, requiring fantastic air and ground support to achieve. Whereas dropping nukes is easy. It was precisely that ease-of-use that raised the profile of game theory and Mutually Assured Destruction, tit-for-tat, and all the other novelties occurrent in the nuclear world and not the one it supplanted.

Arguing from what happened with looms feels like the sort of undergrad maneuver that makes for a good term paper, but lousy economic policy. So many disanalogies.

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

#205

Post by xwdv »

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,…

Even in a world of perfect AI, there will be plenty of jobs. Anything involving movement and manipulation of matter will still require humans for the time being. We’re not at a point yet where an intelligent an AI could simply build you a house without human labor involved.

Many of these jobs are cheap and easy to understand and quick to train in. These aren’t the kind of jobs people probably wanted, but they’ll be there.

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

#206

Post by JohnFen »

psychphysic wrote: post #167
dogcomplex wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Retraining only works if there are jobs available.

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

#207

Post by layer8 »

WalterBright wrote: post #152
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,…

Think of people who have jobs like archaeology, digging up bones. The only way these jobs can exist is if technology has taken over much of the grunt work of production. As for human translators, the need for them far, far exceeds the number of them. Have you ever needed translation help? I sure have, but no human translator was available or was too expensive.

> was too expensive.

This is probably the real problem. Translators are payed shit nowadays for what is a really high-skill job. I have translators in the extended family who had to give up on that line of work because the pay wouldn’t sustain them anymore.

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

#208

Post by msm_ »

moffkalast wrote: post #191
WalterBright wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

Can't wait for the economy that is 97% twitch streamers because that's all what humans are left qualified for. /s

You joke, but an economy that is 97% artists (aka content creators) sounds... good? Isn't this the utopic end goal after we automate the scarcity out of our lifes?

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

#209

Post by krapp »

seydor wrote: post #201
qwerty3344 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are entire sectors of the economy that LLMs can't touch - hospitality, manufacturing, caregivers, religious sectors, live-action entertainment, etc. Sure some of these will be replaced by robots but there will always be new jobs too.

white collar workers detest these jobs the only reason they studied, went to university etc was to avoid doing manual labour. this has been happening for decades, a century. they ll be depressed

Just give them the same lecture they like to trot out about supply and demand and how automation simply creates new opportunities. And then have an AI compose a dirge to play on the world's smallest violin for them.

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

#210

Post by xwolfi »

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,…

Come on, we could do it when we abandonned the horses, we can do it again.
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