If someone build a software that would be able to attend a meeting instead of you - it will become as popular as Zoom. Combine LLM with voice and video recognition and synthesis, and voila - an immense chunk of wasted time in every corporation is gone.
Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
351–360 of 527 posts
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#352Wow - 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,…
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Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#353I see chatGPT as eliminating an awful lot of drudgery.
For example, back in the 60's my dad was working on his book. The text was typed out double spaced, and he (and others) would make corrections. After a while, my mom would retype the whole thing.
Imagine typing a whole book. Again and again and again. She'd type hour after hour. It's dehumanizing.
And then came word processors. What a magical revolution! You could edit text instead of typing it all over again. I bet few people today realize what a great achievement that was.
All chatgpt does is select the most likely next word out of a corpus of existing text. It is not creative.
We don't need rooms full of typists anymore. Good riddance. I bet we get rid of a bunch of drudgery jobs with chatgpt.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#354Wow - 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,…
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Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
those projects were just PR so that c-levels could sell how they were preparing their company for a digital world This is exactly it. The 2017-2019 corporate version of "invest in AI" meant to build an in-house team to do ML experiments on internal data, and then usually evolved a bit to get some "ml-ops" thrown in so they could "deploy" the models they built. I spent some time with a few companies doing this and it…
> having an internal team makes no sense. Disagree. I was on one of these R&D/prototyping teams running ML experiments and you're right, it was the company wanting to present itself as future-leaning, ready to adapt, and I would say that at this point it was a good move to have employees who understand where the tech is going. Companies with internal teams that are able to implement open source models are in a much b…
They’ve been being sold snake oil for years internally, is I think the point being made.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#356Wow - 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,…
> 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, etc., are due to the fact that lots of people no longer have competitive enough skills because technology made them obsolete.
I think the problem is that money saved from making those jobs redundant is not going back to the society but few heads on top. That's the fundamental problem, company moves money from payroll to tech that replaces the people and any savings are entirely company's profits.
And then they go ahead on tax avoiding spree so increased profits don't even flow back to the society
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't think it's so simple. A few counter-notes - Google translate and its ilk have already significantly cut down the number of translators required for multinational companies. Google translate in 2006 is also a bad example, it really only got excellent in the past few years. - I would trust GPT to write the first draft, and then hire a translator to check it. That goes from many billable hours to one, or two. Th…
Or there will be a lot more translations produced, because they are so cheap, and human translators will have more work checking them all.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Consider how expensive textiles were before weaving machines. People wore their one set of clothes until they disintegrated.
Fast forward to today. I received a solicitation for a charity in the mail the other day. They enclosed pictures of the poor kids. The kids were all wearing fashionable, spotless clothes in perfect condition.
That's what industrial textile machines gave us.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#359Earlier 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…
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, co…
> And schools do often have elective shop, cooking, electronics etc classes for those who want to do them.
Ha, those were cut from school before I was in high school decades ago.
Re: Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies?
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
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%.
This hoary take irks me. There were still places for human endeavour to go when the looms were automated. That is no longer the case. Think of it instead as cognitive habitat. Sure, there has been habitat loss in the past, but those losses have been offset by habitat gains elsewhere. This time, I don't see anywhere for habitat gains to come, and I see a massive, enormous, looming (ha!) cognitive habitat loss. -- EDIT…
> the same will not be true this time
This prediction has occurred with every technology revolution. It hasn't been borne out yet.
> the sort of undergrad maneuver
It's a variation of the broken window fallacy.