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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?

#311

Post by xdennis »

toss1 wrote: post #214
jurassic wrote: post #180

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…

The owner class gets enlightened and makes sure that the govt taxes them and implements a solid Universal Basic Income 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,…

> The owner class gets enlightened and makes sure that the govt taxes them and implements a solid Universal Basic Income

But where will they make their billions from if everyone will be living on a basic income? Less money for them will mean less tax money, and less UBI. It will spiral out of control into complete societal collapse if AI doesn't hit a plateau soon.

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

#313

Post by mr_toad »

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…

AI was developed with solid used cases - mostly image recognition or other classification problems. Remember when you couldn’t select text in an image file and paste it into a document? Well that’s a solved problem. The fact that AI has been overhyped and business struggle to find uses for it doesn’t diminish the cases where it does work well.

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

#314

Post by amrocha »

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.

The comment I was replying to stated that that lifestyle is achievable for traditionally minimum wage (or close to it) jobs as long as you choose to live in a small city though

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

#315

Post by shswkna »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #270
pcthrowaway wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 iss…

I wonder why not more people are seeing it from this angle. My tech company is in southern africa, and I struggle to find the talent to fit my customers / the market’s needs. We can’t compete with salaries in the US or western countries in general.

Now, my average tech staff can actually solve challenging coding problems that before could only be done by the few talented ones.

It does not solve all shortcomings, but it definitely shifts the collective cognitive load in the company.

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

#316

Post by all2 »

zamnos wrote: post #304
WalterBright wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'll note that the US government, by design, does not control the Fed. International bankers control the Fed.

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

#317

Post by nmeagent »

evo_9 wrote: post #288
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,…

Yeah – first off, I agree with everything you are saying. I would just add that this is a larger problem just starting to come into focus, which is this: over a long enough period of time virtually ALL jobs will be eliminated. There was a time when man thought – let's make our lives easier by inventing 'tools' and eventually, we will have 'tools' so advance we'll sit around and discuss philosophy like we're all Greek…

> Basically, money as we know it is going to go away, we won't be a society of limited resources anymore.

I doubt it. There will probably always be some scarcity. Even if we remove (or effectively remove) scarcity of physical resources or energy, there is still only a limited amount of time. You could base an entire economy on time and you'd still need some kind of a medium of exchange. Even in Star Trek TNG, every schmo on Earth doesn't have access to Federation supercomputing clusters or their own starship.

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

#318

Post by bilbo0s »

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

I think the material point is that there will be far fewer of those people if everything goes well. You should need fewer people to do any arbitrary task when you are leveraging LLMs.

My own opinion is that people are going to have to become creators. And quickly. You can still create digital products, but you'll need to be a lot more quiet about what you're doing. And you'll need to have a facility for abstract thought to come up with ideas that no one else has yet.

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

#319

Post by jll29 »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #262
jll29 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The late Fred Jelinek, founder and manager of IBM's speech recognition R&D team at TJ Watson Research Center @ Yorktown Heights created the famous joke "every time I fire a linguist, recognition accuracy goes up" - as someone with a stake in both ML and NLP I would say more credit goes to ML than to NLP for sure.

Will linguistic knowledge not be needed at all? I don't want to speculate about the far-out future, but what I can safely say from industry experience that at any stage (1996 - now) there was always some extra gain to be had on top of the ((statistical | neural) - only) approach of the day by engineering hybrid solutions that at some level also exploit human-injected linguistic knowledge and human-injected business rules.

Next month at ECIR 2023 in Dublin, I will present a "shoot out" between a BERT model especially pre-trained (for months) and fine-tuned for document summarization of financial meetings (earnings calls) and a one-line POSIX shell script (two cascaded grep commands) written in 3 minutes by yours truly that also extrcts a summary - with surprising results...

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

#320

Post by ignoramous »

blablabla123 wrote: post #299
jurassic wrote: post #180

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…

Yeah also considering the article on Ars today about people testing whether ChatGPT poses no harm. I think singularity is coming but much differently than anticipated. So yes, the economy will have to change massively and less work hours are needed. (And the concepts are there: Negative Income tax, Universal basic income...) The change will be more graceful the less everybody is in denial. As mentioned elsewhere this…

What does "doing it right this time" entail? How does it look like?
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