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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?

#341

Post by mr_toad »

xdennis wrote: post #298
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.

> For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned. It's the same in Romanian, and I guess many other languages. Many of the common words of European languages are derived from Greek and Latin, and where the meaning has diverged in English, now (because of its ubiquity) these false friends are being realigned to mean what they do in English.

In Ancient Greek pathos also meant a kind of “existence is suffering”, so you could say that the English meaning of pathetic has come full circle.

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

#342

Post by lezojeda »

pxc wrote: post #150
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,…

> I mean, 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? It's fine to say "great, that can free up people for other thing", but given our current economic systems, how are these people supposed to eat? And it doesn't mean that the replacements will be much better, or even as good as the Humana they repla…

[dead]

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

#343

Post by s__s »

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

With a few exceptions, using an LLM to perform a useful service is something that almost anyone will be able to do. Therefore these jobs will be not pay well.

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

#344

Post by eggsmediumrare »

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?

Your comment seems almost intentionally obtuse... How's them internet and smartphones doing the watershed world changing these days?

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

#345

Post by nl »

bgroat wrote: post #293
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,…

Something curious that I've noticed is that the people who I see that are MOST excited are in tech. When I show ChatGPT to a lay person they don't really care. When I show it to a professional copywriter they say that if they submitted this content to a client they would lose the client. I'm reminded of when my son was learning to talk and everything he said seemed brilliant and coherent to me. To any stranger it sou…

You should speak to some teachers - or at least school students.

I guarantee students are more excited about it than tech people because they are using it to successfully pass assignments.

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

#346

Post by astockwell »

bee_rider wrote: post #333
astockwell wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hmm. Hypothetically if a human on first line help desk gives advice that is so completely bad as to be a crime, are they liable or the company? Because I guess a chat-bot would definitely not be liable.

How often is your fast food order 100% correct?

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

#348

Post by WalterBright »

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.

The chart shows what happened to the money generated by increased productivity.

The government spent it.

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

#349

Post by satvikpendem »

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…

> But it will always be a 80% solution because it's an evolutionary dead end: it can't know things, we have only figured out how to trick it into pretending that it does.

At the margin, these are equivalent (Chinese room, and all). I wonder if humans also learn similarly then retroactively tell themselves they actually do know things instead of just containing experiences encoded in their neurons (and whether that is any different than a neural network encoding trained "knowledge" in its neurons, too). This is the semantics of epistemology, at the end of the day.

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

#350

Post by qwerty3344 »

s__s wrote: post #343
woah wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

With a few exceptions, using an LLM to perform a useful service is something that almost anyone will be able to do. Therefore these jobs will be not pay well.

There is huge variation in how well people can prompt LLMs, prompt-engineering has many tricks that aren't obvious, that's why there's prompt engineers,
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