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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?

#271

Post by mecklyuii »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #28
echelon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, I can't wait for GPT and other productivity tools to wrech havock upon the tech labour market. Some people in tech really need to be taken down a notch or two. That's an odd reason to want this.

Less bullshit jobs. Society needs doctors, nurses, plumbers and teachers not tech bros.

I'm not a 'tech bro'.

My job is to optimize workflows which reduce cost, CO2 and make the world better and easier.

It's not my fault that society is unable to optimize everything for less work for everyone while everyone can have a good live.

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

#272

Post by paganel »

bippingchip wrote: post #4

As one of the comments on reddit posts - it's not just big tech companies, but also entire university teams which feel the goalposts moving miles ahead all of a sudden. Imagine working on your PhD on chat bots since start of 2022. Your entire PhD topic might be irrelevant already...

> Imagine working on your PhD on chat bots

To be honest, that's a sh*tty PhD to begin with, it doesn't bring anything good and really worthwhile to the world, quite the contrary.

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

#273

Post by achr2 »

layer8 wrote: post #246
adelie wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 almo…

I don’t think it’s really because “the machine is doing most of the work”, but because there’s no good way for clients to assess the quality of the supplemental human work, and therefore the market gets flooded with subpar translators who do the task sloppily on the cheap, in a way that still passes as acceptable.

Which is exactly what this new breed of AI does - create a facsimile that is good enough to devalue the human equivalent.

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

#274

Post by glasss »

HPsquared wrote: post #243
amrocha wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of life is not achievable on minimum wage, even if you choose to live in a small city

Only about 1% of workers are on minimum wage, you wouldn't expect an average lifestyle from that.

Very anecdotal, but I don't know anyone making minium wage for my area. I do know tons of people making within 1-2 dollars of minimum wage though. If we divvy up the data into groups like that, I wonder how much that 1% jumps.

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

#275

Post by veqq »

salad-tycoon wrote: post #245
mostlysimilar wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible that we've been writing speculative fiction about this for decades and still we sleepwalk right into it. I'd love to be wrong, but I think we're all still too divided and self-interested for this kind of technology to be successfully integrated. A lot of people are going to suffer.

It’s not just sci fi. It’s has already happened in past with construction. Things like pyramids and certain cathedrals and what not are no longer possible even with machines. At least this is what I’ve read and heard, I’m not actually an engineer or architect. Tangent, I’m looking for some sci fi about this topic. Any suggestions?

No. Things like Greek fire or Roman cement aren't possible - because we don't know the precise mixture or formulation involved. Many old descriptions mean we don't know how to do it, because they are very vague.

But we can technically do much better waterproof concrete or whatever - however our incentives are also not aligned in the same ways.

Here's a tangential link to monks building a Gothic cathedral with modern machines: https://carmelitegothic.com/

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

#276

Post by glasss »

ChancyChance wrote: post #268
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I think there's risk in trades like any business, but the world will always need plumbers, electricians, etc. Someone will always find the market price for when people are willing to pay to not have to interact with sewage or potentially get shocked.

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

#277

Post by IanCal »

snowwrestler wrote: post #50
IanCal wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried bing chat? That search & sourcing is exactly what it does.

Sure, but the sources list is generated by the same system that generated the text, so it’s equally subject to hallucinations. Some examples in here: https://dkb.blog/p/bing-ai-cant-be-trusted To answer the question above, these systems cannot provide sources because they don’t work that way. Their source for everything is, basically, everything. They are trained on a huge corpus of text data and every output depends…

The issues are good to know about but

> Their source for everything is, basically, everything. They are trained on a huge corpus of text data and every output depends on that entire training.

Bing chat is explicitly taking in extra data. It's a distinctly different setup from chatgpt.

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

#278

Post by jordanbeiber »

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?

Sure, with UBI. Otherwise not so much.

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

#279

Post by acuozzo »

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?

> GPT is only possible because it's been trained on the work humans have learned to do and then put out in the world.

Which really makes you wonder if F/OSS was a good idea in the first place.

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

#280

Post by tootie »

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…

I know only the bare basics of NLP and AI but isn't Google basically just a specialized case of LLM? Translate and Search work on the same principle that all you need to do is regression analysis on a huge pile of human behavior. Early search engines worked so hard to try to understand content and user intent and got thumped by a comparatively naive heuristic and a giant pile of data.
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