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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?

#301

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #164
csa wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality, etc., I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality? Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared profits more wide…

> the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the current world, where do you think a lot of the capital class is able to get their capital? Technological progress, and especially the Internet, has made much bigger markets out of what were previously lots of little markets, and now th "winner take all/most" dynamics make it so that where you previously could have, for…

The "star system" probably started when the printing press made advertising leaflets affordable.

(Yes, they were printing bibles; radio and TV and the internet originally were going to be educational ...)

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

#302

Post by xdennis »

pyuser583 wrote: post #99
pohuing wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pathetic can mean emotional in English as well. Though I only discovered that by reading the dictionary. For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned.

That’s a definition you see as technical term in Ancient Philosophy. Beyond literal translations from Greek, it doesn’t come up much.

Yeah, if someone gives a heartfelt speech at a wedding and I call it pathetic, I don't think people will appreciate it.

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

#303

Post by shawntan »

LeftHandPath wrote: post #286
mr_toad wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ Seeking an improvement that makes a difference in the shorter term, researchers seek to leverage their human knowledge of the domain, but the only thing that matters in the long run is the leveraging of computation. “ http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

This is a great read. It is accurate to what I felt the last time I trained a CNN -- it's not fun , and I don't get to feel clever. My brain isn't wired to give me a dopamine hit when the training does its job. It's just a, "wait, that's it?" We will always want to do the discovery ourselves, and I can see why fighting that instinct is a challenge for those in the field.

Isn't the CNN a discovery in itself? Without it, we'd be following the bitter lesson and "leveraging computation" to throw more data / compute at an MLP.

Clearly someone felt that there'd be a better inductive bias and attempted something else, and now CNNs are what's used "in the long run".

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

#304

Post by zamnos »

WalterBright wrote: post #157
csa wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality, etc., I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality? Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared profits more wide…

> Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. Consider the elephant in the room: https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per... Where does that money come from?

I was with that site until it compared the US budget to a household budget with a credit card. The average American family doesn't control the federal reserve or set interest rates and employs zero economists, so that seems like a dumb way to think about the problem.

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

#305

Post by umaar »

org3 wrote: post #126
mashygpig wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a new trend happening these days. Upon releasing new non-fiction books to the general public, authors are simultaneously offering an LLM-based chatbot box where you can ask the book any question. Can you link to an example?

https://portal.konjer.xyz/

Incredible results to my questions. Do these work by finding similar pieces of text from a vector DB, and then embedding those similar pieces of text in the prompt? The answers I'm getting seem to be comprehensive, as if it has considered large amounts of book text, curious how this works as there's an OpenAI token limit. I've heard this is what tools like langchain can help with, so maybe I should play around with that as this all seems like a mystery to me.

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

#306

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

WalterBright wrote: post #157
csa wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality, etc., I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality? Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared profits more wide…

> Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. Consider the elephant in the room: https://www.federalbudgetinpictures.com/federal-spending-per... Where does that money come from?

Out of the "how much is left over the subsistence budget" that has been growing since the Industrial Revolution started?

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

izacus wrote: post #232
emptysongglass wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by p1necone »

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…

Schools have always been like that. There's a reason that all of those skilled trades require multi year apprenticeships.

School teaches everybody to read, write and reason about things in general to a decent level. You can't teach high school kids the basics of all the careers out there beyond stuff that's generally applicable - you wouldn't have the time or the equipment. And schools do often have elective shop, cooking, electronics etc classes for those who want to do them.

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

#309

Post by shawntan »

256lie wrote: post #281
shawntan wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to hear what these techniques are. Decreasing the generality will help, but I fail to see how that scopes the output. At best that mitigates the errors to an extent.

conformal prediction

Predicting a set of answers to some confidence interval would still result in hallucinated answers.

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

#310

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

tkgally wrote: post #247
hnfong wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learnt some very basics of computational linguistics since it was related to a side project. I kept wondering why people were spending huge amounts of resources into tagging and labelling corpora of thousands of words, while to me it seems that in theory it should be possible to feed wikipedia (of a certain language) into a program and have it spit out some statistically correct rules about words and grammar. I gue…

I've just started testing GPT-4 on translation from Japanese to English, but it seems to blow Google Translate out of the water. It was particularly good with a novel excerpt. I encourage people to try it with a variety of languages and texts to see if those results hold up.

It would be useful to know whether you know both languages or just English.

Not trying to poke holes, just clarifying.

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