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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?

#471
post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the luddites still starved to death in the street... tell me exactly what we're doing, especially in the US, to avoid the luddites 2.0?

They did?! I thought they just had to learn and adapt doing something else eventually during a transition which was not very fast while also enjoying the new, better and cheaper products available to all.

Any source for those starvation deaths? I would like to learn more about what prevented them from simply doing what the survivors did.

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

#472

I tried translating something from English to German (my native language) yesterday with ChatGPT4 and compared it to Microsoft Translate, Google Translate and DeepL. My ranking: 1. ChatGPT4 - flawless translation. I was blown away 2. DeepL - very close, but one mistake 3. Google Translate - good translation, some mistakes 4. Microsoft Translate - bad translation, many mistakes I can understand the panic.

I've spent a lot of time comparing ChatGPT4 to DeepL Pro on English to French translation. ChatGPT4 is quite good, but not as consistently good as DeepL.

But the interesting thing IMHO is the nature of the mistakes ChatGPT makes... often they're quite elementary mistakes (e.g., the occasional subject-adjective word order) while it gets the big picture right. Whereas DeepL is sometimes the reverse. ChatGPT also has the advantage of being able to tailor its output to a particular context, e.g., it can tailor legal translations to terms used in Canadian law rather than French law. However, for longer texts, I've noticed that ChatGPT will sometimes omit small parts of the source text from the translation, which is unfortunate.

I have a colleague who says that the Mandarin translations done by ChatGPT are an order of magnitude better than DeepL though, which is interesting.

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

#473
post #452
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke, but an economy that is 97% artists (aka content creators) sounds... good? Isn't this the utopic end goal after we automate the scarcity out of our lifes?

And who is going to pay those artists? Entertainment professions usually serve those who have money to spend.

An automation tax can replace the income tax to fund social needs.

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

#474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps those in tech can simply see further out. It reminds me of the advent of the internet, the lay person also didn't care, until websites and web apps were made that catered to their needs. But the people who made those sites and apps were precisely the tech people who could see beyond the lay person's idea of what the internet was. So too with AI.

So too with NFTs and web3 /s

Without the sarcasm, yes :)

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

#475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That kind of life is not achievable on minimum wage, even if you choose to live in a small city

GP said "barber". You said "minimum wage". I'm confused. GP is saying (I think) that you can live well outside a big city on working class wages.

I was about to reply the same and I looked up the BLS data. The median wage for a barber is $14.41. Now I know that's at or below minimum wage in cities, but I suspect it's quite higher the minimum wage in rural areas.

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

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go into industry you’ll be given a chance to deploy these models and rush them into products. You’ll also make good money. If you go into academia (or research, whether it’s in academia or industry) you’ll be given the chance to try to understand what they’re doing. I can see the appeal of making money and rushing products out. But it wouldn’t even begin to compete with my curiosity. Makes me wish I was younge…

Do both. Getting your hands dirty is the best way to understand how something works. Think about all the useless SE and PL work that gets done by folks who never programmed for a living, and how often faculty members in those fields with 10 yoe in industry spend their first few years back in academia just slamming ball after ball way out of the park. More importantly, $500K gross is $300K net. Times 5 is $1.5, or tim…

What does "profess of practice and tear it up pre-tenure" mean?

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

#477

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…

The idea that an average working person could buy a house in their twenties was only possible: 1) in America, and 2) for the baby boomers generation, maybe for some of Gen X. Nowhere else, never after. This is the exception of exceptions, not a norm.

Be that as it may, I would like to continue at least this part of American exceptionalism. There is still plenty of room in this country for young families to own their own homes.

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

#478
post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perhaps those in tech can simply see further out. It reminds me of the advent of the internet, the lay person also didn't care, until websites and web apps were made that catered to their needs. But the people who made those sites and apps were precisely the tech people who could see beyond the lay person's idea of what the internet was. So too with AI.

Perhaps they have Gell-Mann amnesia and a case of engineer’s disease.

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

#479

They may panic, but they shouldn't. They can quickly pivot. GPT programs can be used off the shelf, but they can also use custom training. Every large org has a huge internal set of documents, plus a large external set of documents relevant to its work (research articles, media articles, domain relevant rules and regulations). They can train a GPT bot to their particular codebase. And that is now. Soon (I'd give it a…

Have you seen Microsoft demo yesterday

https://youtu.be/Bf-dbS9CcRU

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

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking around here in Amsterdam, there is a lot of work to be done. And all the places that aren’t as nice, there is a LOT of work to be done. Computational irreducibility combined with human insatiability combined with ethics entails: a lot of work to be done. Everyone needs to get to work, we aren’t done yet. If robots could do all the work… well, god bless. There is SO much work to do. That makes me think the iss…

I wonder why not more people are seeing it from this angle. My tech company is in southern africa, and I struggle to find the talent to fit my customers / the market’s needs. We can’t compete with salaries in the US or western countries in general. Now, my average tech staff can actually solve challenging coding problems that before could only be done by the few talented ones. It does not solve all shortcomings, but…

If the talent at hand isn’t competent to build it, they aren’t competent to debug or support it.
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