211–220 of 527 posts
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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%.
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.
e.g. Italian citizenship can cost as much as a brand new car in Brazil and almost half of that cost could come from certified translation hurdles.
I worked in a research capacity in the voice assistant org of a big tech company until very recently. There was a lot of panic when ChatGPT came out, as it became clear that the vast bulk of the org's modeling work and research essentially had no future. I feel bad for some of my colleagues who were really specialized in specific NLP technology niches (e.g. building NLU ontologies) which have been made totally obsole…
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…
This is part of what the original UBI concept was about.
If this doesn't happen, yes, there will likely be violence until it is fixed.
The other view is that many technologies that were supposed to reduce work actually net added work, because now more sophisticated tasks could be done by the humans, so the net was similar to the highway paradox where more and wider highways breed more traffic by induced demand.
Where would this demand come from? IDK, but at least initially, these LLMs make such massive errors that keeping a lid on the now-hyper-industrial-scale bullshit[0] spewed by these machines will make many more full time jobs.
Seriously, just today I was amazed at how the GPT model tried to not only BS me with completely fabricated author names for an article that I had it summarize, but it repeatedly did so even after being successively prompted more and more specifically to where it could find the actual author (hint: right after the byline starting with the word "Author". It just keep apologizing and then doubling down on more fantastic lies, as if it were very motivated to hide the truth (I know it's not, that's just how fantablous it was).
[0] Bullshit being defined as speech or writing telling a good tale but with zero regard to the truth or falsehood of any part of it — with no malice but nonetheless a salad of truth and lies.
I see the AI stuff as very different from, say, the microcomputer revolution. People had LOTS of things they wanted to use computers for, but the computers were simply too expensive.
As soon as microprocessors arrived, people had LOTS of things they were already waiting to apply them to. Factory automation was screaming for computers. Payroll management was screaming for computers.
I don't see that with the current AI stuff. What thing was waiting for NLP/OpenAI to get good enough?
Yes, things like computer games opened up whole new vistas, and maybe AI will do that, but that's a 20 year later thing. What stuff was screaming for AI right now? Maybe transcription?
When I see the search bar on any of my favorite forums suddenly become useful, I'll believe that OpenAI stuff actually works.
Finally, the real problem is that OpenAI needs to cough up what I want but then it needs to cough up the original references to what I want. I normally don't make other humans do that. If I'm asking someone for advice, I've already ascertained that I can trust them and I'm probably going to accept their answers. If it's random conversation and interesting or unusual, I'll mark it, but I'm not going to incorporate it until I verify.
Although, given the current political environment, pehaps I should ask other humans to give me more references.
Some big tech companies are witnessing a panic inside their entire org because they focus almost entirely on their competitors (except for the business divisions which are monopolies).
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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.
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.
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…
Why start startup of any kind if there's a bigger company full of people already competing in the same space?
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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?