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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?

#521

Post by HybridCurve »

mostlysimilar wrote: post #131
jgust wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably this problem is solved with technology improvements or the need is recognized to hire experts capable of generating high quality training material. In either situation, there's going to be extreme discomfort.

GPT is good because of collective knowledge, lots of data. What do you have in mind by "hire experts"? Isn't that what we have now? Many experts in many fields, hired to do their work. Cut this number down and you reduce training data.

It's important to note however, that GPT does not itself have any knowledge, only information. Knowledge implies it has comprehension or understanding. It can just as easily produce bad information as good and it has little to no ability to self-assess the accuracy of information it provides.

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

#522

Post by wrycoder »

sodkmfkwegw wrote: post #516
wrycoder wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's way off. The US spends 12% on the military.[0] [0] https://www.thebalancemoney.com/u-s-federal-budget-breakdown...

Sorry about that, I meant to write "discretionary" in there. Regardless, the point of spending less on the military still stands. We can't change mandatory spending or we have millions of elderly people dying because social security vanishes into thin air.

Well, I paid into SS and Medicare for fifty years, and I’m getting less out than I put in. But, still glad to have them.

Some people call it a Ponzi scheme, but it’s a pool, as designed.

The military is a big jobs program and all the industrial support generates a lot of economic activity. Better if they just dropped it in the ocean, though. Too much temptation to test it.

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

#523

Post by xp84 »

oska wrote: post #506
vkazanov wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The breakthrough of ChatGPT is not a brilliant literary work per se. It's how it interprets what people write and provides coherent answers. This was not possible previously. AlphaZero, chess algos do not have to break this barrier, they work form a very clear and well-defined input. It was clear that a mixture of machine brute force and smart thinking would eventually beat us at these games. No magic here. Alpha fam…

Your third paragraph describes language pretty well (although I'd quibble with formal grammars only being 'vague' in their coverage - I think they do a pretty good job although I agree they can never be perfect). And I appreciate the achievement of LLMs in being able to take in language prompts and return useful responses. So it's an achievement that is useful certainly in providing a 'natural language' querying and…

> LLMs can't and will never be able to do these things because, as I've already said, they are completely derivative.

I agree, they are completely derivative. And so are you and I. We have copied everything we know, either from other humans or from whatever we have learned from our simple senses.

I'm not asking you to bet that LLMs will do any of those things really, I suppose it's not a guarantee that anything will improve to a certain point. But I am cautioning not to bet heavily against it because, after witnessing what this generation of LLM is capable of, I no longer believe there's anything fundamentally different about human brains, so, to me, it's like asking if an x86-64 PC will ever be able to emulate a PS5. Maybe not today, but I don't see any reason why a typical PC in 10 or 15 years would have trouble.

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

#524

Post by xp84 »

prottog wrote: post #182
xp84 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you and the one you're replying to are both very right. Yes, more of this money is going, instead of middle-class workers, straight to the capital class who own the "machines" that do the work people used to do. Except instead of it being a factory that makes industrial machines owned by some wealthy industrialist, the machines are things like Google and AWS and the owners are the small number of people with…

> 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…

How middle America lives, for a lot of people, is making within a buck or two of minimum wage, with virtually zero chance of significant advancement, trying to scrape together enough to meet your expenses. You might become assistant manager of the big box store, but that won't transform your life. The only way out is learning a skilled trade or certain college degrees (and likely leaving town).

This isn't specific to cities.

In fact, people in rural areas are worse impacted, because the rise of Walmart, Dollar General, and others funnel money out of their towns that would have otherwise enable many local families to capture the profits from local spending. Today a lot of that spending goes mostly to those companies, and only a fraction of the money stays, in the form of a few low-wage jobs.

I'm not saying it's impossible to not live in poverty. I'm just saying it's much much harder, because "advancement" is obsolete in a lot of occupations where it used to be a thing.

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

#525

Post by xp84 »

prottog wrote: post #290
amrocha wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't see a problem with that, as long as those who may be earning minimum wage at any given time have the opportunity to improve their lot. I see no reason why the lowest incomes would result in median lifestyles.

To be clear, I don't think most people expect that either -- but I'd argue that most entry-level jobs today are just a big endless cycle of unskilled labor staying long enough to get fed up and moving to the next dead-end job, with the companies moving on to the next as well.

In general, I'd argue minimum wage jobs aren't anymore a stepping stone to some sustainable good job; they're basically viewed like consumables by companies. Even someone with a decade of experience, say, at several retail stores or restaurants, can't expect to be offered a position making $50,000 a year plus benefits just for having done his job well every day. By contrast, a dedicated factory worker with a decade of experience 50 years ago could expect to have advanced somewhat, and would expect continued advancement. Today everyone working in retail, restaurants, etc. all know that if they're going to do any better it's going to be by leaving that sector, via learning a trade, going to college, or perhaps founding their own small business. All things which were good options in the past too, but advancement was once a realistic expectation too.

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

#526

Post by atemerev »

hattmall wrote: post #514
atemerev wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Millennials could buy houses in their 20s for sure. The early 2010s were some of the cheapest housing prices relative to wages ever.

The entire world watched in awe. Here in Switzerland (a very well-developed country), buying a house is something done in the forties, if you are middle to upper middle class. Otherwise, you rent forever.

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

#527

Post by sodkmfkwegw »

wrycoder wrote: post #522
sodkmfkwegw wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that, I meant to write "discretionary" in there. Regardless, the point of spending less on the military still stands. We can't change mandatory spending or we have millions of elderly people dying because social security vanishes into thin air.

Well, I paid into SS and Medicare for fifty years, and I’m getting less out than I put in. But, still glad to have them. Some people call it a Ponzi scheme, but it’s a pool, as designed. The military is a big jobs program and all the industrial support generates a lot of economic activity. Better if they just dropped it in the ocean, though. Too much temptation to test it.

Sounds like you know the difference between the two programs then.
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