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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?

#231

Post by yoyohello13 »

xwdv wrote: post #205
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 t…

Now 90% of humanity can toil for 12 hours a day in the fields to support the 10% who own all the machines. Super awesome!

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

#232

Post by izacus »

emptysongglass wrote: post #203
izacus wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Uh-huh.

How's them NFTs and Blockchain doing the watershed world changin these days?

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

#233

Post by adelie »

layer8 wrote: post #207
WalterBright wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yep, exactly. the issue isn't that there will no longer be a need for human translators - machine translation makes subtle mistakes that legal/technical fields will need a human to double-check.

the issue is that many translation jobs will, and already are, being replaced with 'proofread machine translation output' jobs that simply don't pay enough. translation checking is careful, detailed work that often takes almost as much time as translating passages yourself, yet it pays a third or less of the rate because 'the machine is doing most of the work.'

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

#234

Post by seydor »

woah wrote: post #200
jurassic wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there are not. Everything in the economy is connected and you can't have a vibrant industry without customers. The customers of hospitality/entertainment/healthcare/etc businesses are largely the middle class who will be put out of work by LLMs. So the person who today makes $200/night in tips waiting tables at a nice restaurant.... who will be buying those meals?

Someone who uses an LLM as a tool to perform a useful service

That would be another LLM or a robot then

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

#235

Post by astockwell »

swatcoder wrote: post #117
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…

> There is no good reason this should not work everywhere else, in exactly the same way. Take for example a large retailer who has a large internal knowledge base. Train an LLM on that corpus, ask the knowledge base any question. Since LLM’s can’t scope themselves to be strictly true or accurate, there are indeed good reasons, like liability for false claims and added traditional support burden from incorrect guidanc…

If they are accurate for ~80% of the questions, they will be as accurate as any 1st or 2nd line help desk.

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

#236

Post by UmYeahNo »

screye wrote: post #221
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,…

> human translators, medical transcriptionists, court reporters Yes, they will be all called 'ai data labellers'. For a long time, "People don't just want jobs, they want good jobs" was the slogan of industries that automated the boring stuff. Now AI is suddenly good at all the jobs people actually want and the only thing it can't do is self-improve. In an AI future, mediocre anything will not exist anymore. Either y…

>In an AI future, mediocre anything will not exist anymore.

Right! Aren't we all mediocre before we're excellent? Isn't every entry level job some version of trying to get past being mediocre? i.e. Isn't a jr developer "mediocre" compared to a senior dev? If AI replaces the jr dev, how will anyone become a senior dev if they never got the chance to gain experience to become less mediocre?

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

#237

Post by Tiktaalik »

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,…

> does anyone think that things like human translators, medical transcriptionists, court reporters, etc. will exist as jobs at all in 10-20 years? Maybe 1-2 years?

Maybe the very, very basic transcription/translation stuff might go away, but arguably this race to the bottom market was already being killed by google translate as bad as it is anyway.

In areas where quality is required (eg. localizing video games from japanese to english and vis versa) people would be (justifiably) fussy about poor localization quality even when the translation was being done by humans, so I have to imagine that people will continue to be fussy and there will still be significant demand for quality job done by people who aren't just straight translating text, but localizing text for a different audience from another culture.

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

#238

Post by krapp »

seydor wrote: post #217
krapp wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's not even their fault. societies, cities have been built to produce this kind of people

It isn't anyone's fault but the capitalist class. Still, real life holds no sympathy for people who consider any work beneath their dignity.

They'll be depressed? Tough shit, we're all depressed.

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

#239

Post by nl »

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…

> Computational Linguistics I kept running into the unspoken question

I've done a lot of work in NLP and the times when computational linguistics has been useful is very rare. The only time I shipped something to production that used it was a classifier for documents that needed to evaluate them on a sentence by sentence basis for possible compliance issues. Computational linguistics was useful then because I could rewrite mulit-clause sentences into simpler single clause sentences which the classifier could get better accuracy on.

> And here was Google Translate being "good enough" for 80% of all use cases using a "dumb" statistic model that didn't even have a coherent concept of what a language is.

I assume you are aware if Frederick Jelinek quote "Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up"?[1]

That was in 1998. It's been pretty clear for a long time that computational linguistics can provide some tools to help us understand language but it is insufficiently reliable to use for unconstrained tasks.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jelinek

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

#240

Post by salad-tycoon »

msm_ wrote: post #208
moffkalast wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have you seen some of that content? This sounds like a level in Dante’s inferno, all day everyday all “these” (and myself probably ) people going blah blah blah into the either. Navel gazing to the extreme.
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