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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?

#391

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,…

For the translator job, that is already the reality. I saw Chinese students major in English and translation post comments in social media that company are already asking the employees to first ask ChatGPT and then review the response. It's true that there are few top students can do better in translating than ChatGPT, but it was told that only students are outstanding in both English and Chinese can do it.

There are hundreds of thousands of people making their living on translating, and now most of them need to find something else to survive now.

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

#392
Maybe semantics, but... The implication of this post is that ChatGPT is causing the demise of NLP jobs, which, sure, that's true - but I don't think it's fair to classify this as replacing the job of anyone who works on NLP. This is not the same as GPT replacing a human translator, which is a direct replacement of their role - it's not like ChatGPT is going to start researching NLP. It's just a fairly mundane example of a superior technology outpacing an inferior one. The technology of NLP is being obsoleted, not the job of researching NLP (which is just unnecessary, not being replaced with something else). And in fact, NLP researchers are probably some of the most well positioned people to move laterally to working on transformers and LLMs.

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah... Google Translate is still occasionally translating good/item as "baby" on taobao. "Return Defective Baby" was hilarious for a year or two, but that was ~8 years ago IIRC, and now it just stands as a reminder that Google Translate still has a considerable way to go.

Google translate lets you correct a translation, right? Did people stop doing this at some point? Maybe after the advent of massively addictive social media, people more often ended up screenshotting it and sharing it for likes instead of correcting it. I'm sure Google have stats on this but no idea whether they're public.

I haven't seen the option to correct a translation in years.

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

#394
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The system gave them work to keep them busy, now its been automated and keeps the system busy. I only regret it didn't exist when I was in school.

A way to work around busy work is exactly what schools need to make them stop assigning busy work.

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

#395
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did GPS tracking companies survive Google and Google Maps? I think there will probably be many niches to explore even as the big names work hard to compete and eventually commoditize LLMs

I haven't heard the name TomTom in over a decade.

They’re still around

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

#397

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,…

> 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? Maybe the very, very basic transcription/translation stuff might go away, but arguably this race to the bottom market was already being killed by google translate as bad as it is anyway. In areas where quality is required (eg. localizing video games from j…

You have no chance to survive make your time.

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

#398

The PR folks at my current company are in full panic mode on Linkedin, judging from the passive-aggressive tone of their posts (sometimes very nearly begging customers not to use ChatGPT and friends). They fully understand that LLMs are stealing lunch money from established information retrieval industry players selling overpriced search algorithms. For a long time, my company was deluded about being protected by ins…

> There is no good reason this should not work everywhere else, in exactly the same way. Take for example a large retailer who has a large internal knowledge base. Train an LLM on that corpus, ask the knowledge base any question. Since LLM’s can’t scope themselves to be strictly true or accurate, there are indeed good reasons, like liability for false claims and added traditional support burden from incorrect guidanc…

> Since LLM’s can’t scope themselves to be strictly true or accurate

Bing tries to solve this and succeeds somewhat. It will insert Wikipedia style citations against each of its claims. You can visit them and verify the statement if you want. And I do it often.

No reason why a future DocAI can't link to specific sections in internal documents whenever it answers a question.

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

#399
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The system gave them work to keep them busy, now its been automated and keeps the system busy. I only regret it didn't exist when I was in school.

Teaching kids how to communicate by, for example, writing a book report or an essay is not "busy work". I feel very lucky that I had good teachers that focused on the basics of writing. I remember at the time not liking some of it at all (I had one teacher who made us diagram sentences endlessly), but as an adult I'm really grateful I had that education.

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

#400
post #238
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not even their fault. societies, cities have been built to produce this kind of people

It isn't anyone's fault but the capitalist class. Still, real life holds no sympathy for people who consider any work beneath their dignity. They'll be depressed? Tough shit, we're all depressed.

I'm not depressed:)

Software dev. If computer steal my computer job, I have plenty of other physical skills.

Specialisation is for insects.

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