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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?

#431
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh-huh. How's them NFTs and Blockchain doing the watershed world changin these days?

ChatGPT Impact Differences. db112nl@gmail.com Why wasn't Blockchain a watershed moment but chatGPT is. There are several factors that contribute to why blockchain and chatGPT have had different impacts on their respective fields. Firstly, blockchain technology has had a significant impact in certain areas, particularly in the financial industry, where it has been used to create new forms of digital currency and facil…

IMO "public attention and interest" in ChatGPT dissipates at an r-squared rate the further you move out from the tech industry (or the NLP research) bubble.

I'm sure that for the people in the thick of crypto and web3, it would've felt like that was the most important thing on everyone's mind.

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

#432
post #293

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…

Ask the copywriter whether it takes longer to write the content themselves or to edit GPT's output to satisfy the client. If it's 10% faster to edit GPT's output, that means that we need 10% fewer copywriters.

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

#433
post #416
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ This. I think the more we internalize the fact that we're also basically LLMs, the more we'll realize that there likely isn't some hard barrier beyond which no AI can climb. If you watch the things kids who are learning language say, you'll see the same kinds of slip-ups that belie the fact that they don't yet understand all the words themselves, but nobody thinks that 2-year-olds aren't people or thinks they will…

Internalising the idea ( not 'fact') that 'we're basically LLMs' will only take you to a place of deep sterility, delusion and nihilism.

Why? Do you prefer magical "handwavy" thinking?

A lot of things just fall in place if you accept an obvious fact that the brain is just a powerful enough function with certain inputs and outputs.

Neurons are not that complicated.

There are interesting consequences here though: no stable grammars, no truly uniform thinking, no singular way to understand people.

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

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but you could take lots of retail or clerical jobs, advance through hard work and support a family on those wages. Those are the days that are super gone Only in certain places, and only mostly due to crazy policies that made housing ridiculously unaffordable. I'm in an area where my barber lives on 10 acres of land he didn't inherit and together with his wife raises two children. This type of relaxed life is possi…

I am curious if your barber can afford health insurance plus out of pocket maximums for a family of four ($30k+ per year just in premiums plus $5k to $10k oop max), not to mention short and long term disability insurance in case he gets hurt and cannot work. The only situation I can imagine would be if the wife has a government job with extremely generous health insurance subsidies.

Not OP, but I pay my barber $50 for a 15 minute haircut. Runs his “barbershop” out of his house, which he owns, in one of the most desirable neighborhoods in Seattle.

There’s always another appointment lined up before and after mine, so I guess he’s pulling 6 figures without much sweat.

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

#435
post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The state of AI progress makes it impossible for humans in many fields to keep up The way it works, someone would have to produce more original training data in the first place. In long term, it is AI that has to keep up, not the other way around. > wealth inequality Microsoft, OpenAI run closed for-profit LLMs that are inherently only possible thanks to creative work of all the people that might stand to lose jobs…

If you think the IP law that is already making the rich even richer is what's going to save us you're highly confused. And if you think that AI is going to stay at LLMs and not eventually evolve into self learning/self modifying systems you are shortsighted.

> If you think the IP law that is already making the rich even richer

On the contrary, the confusion is all yours. This is literally the reason plenty of photographers, illustrators were able to make money, as just one example. Without this any major publication could just grab whatever photo or artwork they saw fit, but they didn’t precisely because there’s such thing as IP law.

Before you argue for some form of communism without any intellectual property, ask yourself why people produced creative work in the first place (you know, all those works thanks to which an LLM can do its thing). Could it be because the fruit of their work was considered their intellectual property? As in, they were paid for it and were in control of it?

Now as soon as LLMs are trained on that work and can suddenly can produce derivatives cheaper, techbros are suddenly all like “let’s pretend IP law is some unfair thing that only benefitted the rich”. Those publishers now pay OpenAI/Microsoft for those very photographs and illustrations, that were taken for free, while the very people who created them would be losing jobs and gigs. Similar to book authors and other creative industries.

Do you really think this works in favor of decreasing the wealth gap? Not having to pay original creators for their work and instead paying a fraction of a penny to Microsoft while those creators starve? Aren’t you living in perpetual cognitive dissonance from these mental gymnastics?

No surprise non-tech people and especially creatives hate tech people more and more.

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

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often is your fast food order 100% correct?

Sometimes they accidentally include tomatoes but they rarely include bombs.

Wrong food could be equivalent to bombs in worst case for who have allergy

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

#438

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,…

> won't take everyone's job, it will just open up new areas for new jobs.

This was true for Industrial Automation when machines automated physical work and humans could do knowledge work.

Now machines are on the verge of automating knowledge there would be no work left for humans.

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

#439

Earlier 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…

Loved reading your thoughts on the situation in this thread, super interesting and depressing at the same time.

I wonder how long it will take politics to appreciate the deep societal problems that may soon arise. Probably it will be too little, too late.

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

#440
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internalising the idea ( not 'fact') that 'we're basically LLMs' will only take you to a place of deep sterility, delusion and nihilism.

Why? Do you prefer magical "handwavy" thinking? A lot of things just fall in place if you accept an obvious fact that the brain is just a powerful enough function with certain inputs and outputs. Neurons are not that complicated. There are interesting consequences here though: no stable grammars, no truly uniform thinking, no singular way to understand people.

The 'handwavey' thinking here is from those who state as a 'fact' that the human brain is an LLM
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