Anyone else witnessing a panic inside NLP orgs of big tech companies? • Hacker News Board

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

#461

Post by KevinGlass » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:01 PM UTC

psychphysic wrote: post #167

dogcomplex wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very obvious there is a mass unemployment wave coming - or at least a mass "retraining" wave, though the new jobs "teaching AIs" or whatever remain to be seen. I hope everyone currently just questioning whether this will happen now is prepared to state it with conviction in the coming months and fight for some sort of social protection program for all these displaced people, because the profits from this new wo…

If not unemployment and retraining then a lot of people are going to need to miraculously become better at their jobs. I somehow imagine it'll be the worst of both worlds but I'm a glass half empty kind of guy.

AI doesn't have to better, or even 90% as good. It just has to be cheaper.

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

#462

Post by lotsofpulp » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

fingerlocks wrote: post #434

lotsofpulp wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something tells me a rural barber in a place he can afford to buy 10 acres without inheritance money is not in a location with many people willing or able to pay $50 for a 15min haircut.

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

#463

Post by alexvoda » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:14 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #358

veqq wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And weaving machines have not fully trickled down to citizens.

You can not easily buy a weaving machine (there are some second hand ones) or easily go to your local maker space and use the weaving machine to create the design you desire. Open source in the space of textile making is in its infancy even though there are some projects. I bet it is easier to get a low volume tape-out of some custom chips than it is to get a custom roll of textile. (you can get printing but that's not the same thing)

Textiles have become way cheaper and both higher quality (when demanded) and lower quality (cost saving fast fashion) and available in far higher quantities.

Some things were lost in this transition.

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

#464

Post by prottog » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:23 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #462

fingerlocks wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Something tells me a rural barber in a place he can afford to buy 10 acres without inheritance money is not in a location with many people willing or able to pay $50 for a 15min haircut.

You're quite right, people don't pay $50 for a haircut here, but it scales a little less than the cost of living does. I pay $35 inclusive of tip. For what it's worth, the cost of living here is a little over half of that in Seattle.

I live in the principal city of the local Metropolitan Statistical Area; it's by no means a big city, but it's representative of many small cities around the country. My barber lives out in the county, outside of city limits, where it is much more rural and one can indeed buy 10 acres for not a whole lot of money.

I believe his wife is a schoolteacher; I don't believe public employee benefits are especially generous in this state.

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

#465

Post by WA » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:27 PM UTC

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…

To take it further: if 80% is good enough and you gotta do some work anyways on the output of LLMs, maybe all the extrapolations like "just wait 10 years and most jobs are doomed" are exaggerated. It’s not unlikely that LLMs hit a wall, because they inherently lack any sort of logic and reasoning.

Which of course is a good thing to make sure many people get to keep their jobs.

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

#466

Post by lotsofpulp » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:29 PM UTC

prottog wrote: post #464

lotsofpulp wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something tells me a rural barber in a place he can afford to buy 10 acres without inheritance money is not in a location with many people willing or able to pay $50 for a 15min haircut.

You're quite right, people don't pay $50 for a haircut here, but it scales a little less than the cost of living does. I pay $35 inclusive of tip. For what it's worth, the cost of living here is a little over half of that in Seattle. I live in the principal city of the local Metropolitan Statistical Area; it's by no means a big city, but it's representative of many small cities around the country. My barber lives out…

They are usually very generous, especially health insurance subsidies. My friend with a teacher wife pays almost zero, for premiums and out of pocket. And they had multiple IVF rounds covered.

Ask them what their deductible/oop max, and how they get that insurance, and I bet you will have your answer for how your friend can afford to raise a family of 4 as a barber and buy and live on 10 acres of land. I doubt a 2 barber couple could pull it off. The security/benefits of one half of a couple being a government employee is pretty valuable.

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

#467

Post by specproc » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:41 PM UTC

As someone who's a crap NLP practitioner, everything is just fine and dandy.

I've never really had the gear or the skills to put together anything that improves over what I can pull from huggingface.

What I do have, and virtually none of my (not remotely technical) colleagues have, is a clue what to do with all this stuff.

They reckon it's about churning out poems and boilerplate text, the minute I figured it could give me whatever json I could reasonably ask for from a source doc, I was overjoyed.

I see more things I can be doing now, not a risk of being replaced.

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

#468

Post by mistrial9 » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:47 PM UTC

hnxx wrote: post #391

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,…

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…

this is partly true but not accurate in important ways..

The result of ChatGPT depends on the domain of the language. Technical reasoning based on many parts of input, is what the machine was designed for.. human language A to human language B depends on specific models built over the last ten years or so..

But if you subtract those two.. language structure and technical structure, you are left with giant holes in the way humans talk, interact and create.

Overall I would say that people who translate formal documents are in trouble yes.. people who translate to no-loyalty cost-sensitive markets like corporate ads for products or travel recreation things.. are in trouble. But there are many other kinds of communication, and therefore translation.

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

#469

Post by mistrial9 » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 1:49 PM UTC

robben1234 wrote: post #409

JamesAdir wrote: post #136

Earlier 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.

Here's an anecdote for you: Recently I needed a couple payslips translated from German to English and then certified. Google Translate can translate, but cannot certify. Professional licensed translator took significant amount of money and sent me a document for review with most numbers somehow mixed up. It took days of back and forth over the email for them to fix it.

ok - but a translator with certification is available to replace the one that made a mistake. Their guild exists.. The recourse and legal weight of the Google Translate service are very different. You can't compare the two fully without context.

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

#470

Post by vkazanov » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

oska wrote: post #460

vkazanov wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And astrology, and magical thinking, and many other things were always there. So what you say is that humanity is not capable of learning moral behaviour without gods? And this is why it needs deities?

No, humans continually develop moral behaviour and codify it in religion (for transmission and social maintenance). Gods and deities aren't strictly necessary. Buddhism started without such but it is interesting that the conceptualisations of Buddhas & Boddhisattvas have become more and more like the gods & deities of other religions (at least in the popular religious traditions of Buddhism).

Well, I agree with you in that humans inevitable develop moral rules and codify these one way or another. Otherwise a society wouldn't be possible.

Religions are one of the traditional ways of motivating these rules... Legal systems are supporting them on an enforcement level.

I like religions as a very deep cultural phenomena/ideology having all kinds of effects on the, ehm, society. I just don't think religions are strictly necessary for a functioning society.