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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?

#261

Post by amirhirsch »

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.

Funny you mention archaeology. Humans used to apply our excess productivity to building pyramids!

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

#262

Post by jasonfarnon »

jll29 wrote: post #154
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,…

> Imagine if you spent your entire career working on NLP, and now find GPT-4 will run rings around whatever you've done. What do you do now? I have been doing NLP since 1993. Before ca. 1996, there were mostly rule-based systems that were just toys. They lacked robustness. Then statistical systems came up and things like spell-checking (considering context when doing it), part of speech tagging and eventually even pa…

"I think that is not merited. Deep neural models have their own set of problems,"

But I think that is the issue...going forward wouldn't you hire a machine learning specialist rather than an NLP specialist for those problems? As far industry goes, is there any value in all the syntax/semantics/phonology theory NLP folks command?

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

#263

Post by veqq »

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%.

That was very bad for the weavers. Well earning middle class jobs were replaced by toiling in the mills, It then took a few generations for the work act to put a 10hr maximum workday etc.

The luddites were trying to defend their livelihoods, communities etc. It's the same rational thing people are looking at now: How to survive

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

#264

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

I work at a small company, but it’s hard for me to imagine that generative AI will replace predictive AI/ML any time soon.

Smaller models trained supervised/in-domain are simply more efficient and more accurate than unsupervised/out-of-domain. Plus we own and operate the technology much more cheaply.

I don’t doubt that if your were trying to build a competing product to what OpenAI is doing that you’d feel affected, but there’s also a lot of other problems that are not being solved by generative models.

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

#265

Post by osigurdson »

karpierz wrote: post #168
osigurdson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair. Maybe let’s look at it a different way. The computer is a solution to N known problems and M unknown problems at the time of creation. I’d say the N/M ratio is vanishing small.

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

#266

Post by liamN »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #227
xp84 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and the one you're replying to are both very right. Yes, more of this money is going, instead of middle-class workers, straight to the capital class who own the "machines" that do the work people used to do. Except instead of it being a factory that makes industrial machines owned by some wealthy industrialist, the machines are things like Google and AWS and the owners are the small number of people with…

> It's really striking though that a person graduating high school in say, 1970, could easily pick from a number of career choices even without doing college or even learning an in-demand trade, like plumbing, welding, etc. [...] Those are the days that are super gone Isn't this rather a strong argument for the claim that what high school as of today teaches is a strong mismatch with what the labour market demands? I…

This is true, but I dont think high school was ever intended to be preparing kids for the labor market; I thought it was to teach a basic education for understanding the world.

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

#267

Post by throwaway675309 »

JamesAdir wrote: post #136
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.

Tools like deepL and Google translate have absolutely put casual translators and part-time translators out of a job. GPT and tools like whisper that can do automatic speech recognition and instant translation will make that even worse.

There will always be a need for careful human translation work in such things as legal documents for government work but those positions will become even more competitive.

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

#268

Post by ChancyChance »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #227
xp84 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and the one you're replying to are both very right. Yes, more of this money is going, instead of middle-class workers, straight to the capital class who own the "machines" that do the work people used to do. Except instead of it being a factory that makes industrial machines owned by some wealthy industrialist, the machines are things like Google and AWS and the owners are the small number of people with…

> It's really striking though that a person graduating high school in say, 1970, could easily pick from a number of career choices even without doing college or even learning an in-demand trade, like plumbing, welding, etc. [...] Those are the days that are super gone Isn't this rather a strong argument for the claim that what high school as of today teaches is a strong mismatch with what the labour market demands? I…

I think there is a risk to the trades as well. Tradesman service prices are skyrocketing, too. With fewer people able to hire them because they cannot afford it, won't trade jobs fall as well?

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

#269

Post by anileated »

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 state of AI progress makes it impossible for humans in many fields to keep up

The way it works, someone would have to produce more original training data in the first place. In long term, it is AI that has to keep up, not the other way around.

> wealth inequality

Microsoft, OpenAI run closed for-profit LLMs that are inherently only possible thanks to creative work of all the people that might stand to lose jobs now. Not only it should be clear where the driving force for rising wealth inequality is going to be going forward—these companies’ effectively scraping original works of living humans and repackaging them for profit should be in violation of intellectual property law, if it isn’t already. Perhaps more people should start adding two and two together.

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

#270

Post by dr_dshiv »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #225
timoth3y wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's the economy, it's the policy. Automating a shit-ton of jobs is great for the economy. The economy is just fine if 90% of people are starving because big corps are saving shit-tons of money. The government of a wealthy country should ensure that its citizens are able to eat, and have a sheltered place to sleep, without them needing to work. Because the way things are going, there won't be enough wor…

Looking around here in Amsterdam, there is a lot of work to be done. And all the places that aren’t as nice, there is a LOT of work to be done.

Computational irreducibility combined with human insatiability combined with ethics entails: a lot of work to be done. Everyone needs to get to work, we aren’t done yet. If robots could do all the work… well, god bless. There is SO much work to do. That makes me think the issue is not “robots taking jobs” but the focus and intention of the collective.

Any new hire is WAY more valuable now that they can use chatGPT. So why aren’t we hiring more people?

Well, one small issue: notice how you get taxed for hiring people a lot more than buying tech? That’s probably something to be fixed.

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