Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 527 posts

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

#111

Post by DebtDeflation »

version_five wrote: post #29
djous wrote: post #18

During my master's degree in data science, we had several companies visit our faculty to recruit students. Not a single one was a specialized NLP company, but many of them had NLP projects going on. Most of those projects were the usual "solution looking for a problem to solve". Even those projects that might have had _some_ utility, would have been way more effective to buy/license a product than to develop an in-ho…

those projects were just PR so that c-levels could sell how they were preparing their company for a digital world This is exactly it. The 2017-2019 corporate version of "invest in AI" meant to build an in-house team to do ML experiments on internal data, and then usually evolved a bit to get some "ml-ops" thrown in so they could "deploy" the models they built. I spent some time with a few companies doing this and it…

>The 2017-2019 corporate version of "invest in AI" meant to build an in-house team to do ML experiments on internal data, and then usually evolved a bit to get some "ml-ops" thrown in so they could "deploy" the models they built.

You nailed it, although very few models actually ever got deployed to Prod at Fortune 500 non-tech companies and the few that did delivered little value. I'm a consultant and most internal AI/ML/DS teams that I interacted with were just running experiments on internal data as you said, and the results would get pasted into Powerpoint, a narrative created, and then presented to executives, who did little or nothing with the "insights". Reminded me of the "Big Data" boom a few years earlier where every company created a Big Data Team who then promptly stood up a Hadoop cluster on prem, ingested every log file they could find, and then..................did nothing with it.

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

#112

Post by jjoonathan »

lisasays wrote: post #101
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…

Given that Google Translate already exists, what is even the point of all of this? Because for the other 20 percent it's plainly -not- good enough. It can't even produce an acceptable business letter in a resource-rich target language, for example. It just gets you "a good chunk of the way there." And there's no evidence that either (1) throwing exponentially more data at the problem with see matching gains in accura…

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.

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

#114

Post by dserban »

mashygpig wrote: post #109
dserban wrote: post #103

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…

> Here's a new trend happening these days. Upon releasing new non-fiction books to the general public, authors are simultaneously offering an LLM-based chatbot box where you can ask the book any question. Can you link to an example?

I saw at least two examples of this here on HN. One of the books was about tech entrepreneurship 101, and I remember asking how to launch if you're a sole developer with no legal entity behind the product. I remember the answer being fairly coherent and useful. I don't have the URL handy, I suspect if you search HN for "entrepreneur book" you'll find it.

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

#115

Post by JohnFen »

osigurdson wrote: post #35
djous wrote: post #18

During my master's degree in data science, we had several companies visit our faculty to recruit students. Not a single one was a specialized NLP company, but many of them had NLP projects going on. Most of those projects were the usual "solution looking for a problem to solve". Even those projects that might have had _some_ utility, would have been way more effective to buy/license a product than to develop an in-ho…

>> "solution looking for a problem to solve" I wonder if this is a bad as everyone thinks. When a new technology arrives which is not completely understood, isn't the right approach to try to find some applications for it? Sure, most will fail, but some valid use cases will likely emerge. I'm pretty sure almost all technologies at some point were solutions looking for a problem to solve. Examples include the internet…

> I'm pretty sure almost all technologies at some point were solutions looking for a problem to solve. Examples include the internet, the computer and math.

I think the opposite -- nearly all technologies came about as a result of people trying to solve existing real problems. Examples include the internet, the computer and math. (Although I don't think "math" counts as a technology.)

The internet came about from darpanet, which was solving the problem of network resiliency. Computers automated what used to be a human job ("computer") of doing very large amounts of computations. That automation was solving the problem of needing to do more computations than could be done with armies of people.

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

#117

Post by swatcoder »

dserban wrote: post #103

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 guidance.

Everybody is getting so far ahead of the horse with this stuff, but we’re just not there yet and don’t know for sure how far we’re going to get.

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

#118

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

avmich wrote: post #108
danaris wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, I can't wait for GPT and other productivity tools to wrech havock upon the tech labour market. Some people in tech really need to be taken down a notch or two. You have to remember that when these sorts of things happen, the ones who get "taken down" in ways that actually affect their lives are invariably the ones who already have the least. The ones who "need" that takedown will be just fine, unless they…

> the ones who get "taken down" in ways that actually affect their lives are invariably the ones who already have the least I'm not sure that was the case with personal computing in 1980-s. What was the significant part of society which had the least and got "taken down"?

Personal computing didn't automate too many things that only humans could previously do. Personal computer enabled you to move the data haystack from paper medium to digital but you still had to know the right SW incantations and meticulously dig through it to find the needle.

ChatGPT and other ML apps can find you the needle in the data haystack. To look up stuff on the PC you still needed to know the location of your stuff, filesystem info and how to formulate queries. You no longer need to learn to "speak machine language" but finally the machines can now understand human language to do what you tell them to do.

Of course, ChatGPT & friends can also say dumb shit or just hallucinate stuff up so you still need a human in the loop to double-check everything.

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

#119

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

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, etc., are due to the fact that lots of people no longer have competitive enough skills because technology made them obsolete.

2. The state of AI progress makes it impossible for humans in many fields to keep up. Imagine if you spent your entire career working on NLP, and now find GPT-4 will run rings around whatever you've done. What do you do now?

I mean, 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? It's fine to say "great, that can free up people for other thing", but given our current economic systems, how are these people supposed to eat?

EDIT: I see a lot of responses along the lines of "Have you seen the bugs Google/Bing Translate has?" or "Imagine how frustrated you get with automated chat bots now!" Gang, the whole point is that GPT-4 blows these existing models out of the water. People who work in these fields are blown away by the huge advances in quality of output in just a short time. So I'm a bit baffled why folks are comparing the annoyances of ordering at a McDonald's automated kiosk to what state-of-the-art LLMs can do. And reminder that the first LLM was only created in 2018.

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

#120

Post by JohnFen »

jjoonathan wrote: post #112
lisasays wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Google Translate already exists, what is even the point of all of this? Because for the other 20 percent it's plainly -not- good enough. It can't even produce an acceptable business letter in a resource-rich target language, for example. It just gets you "a good chunk of the way there." And there's no evidence that either (1) throwing exponentially more data at the problem with see matching gains in accura…

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.

Indeed. Google Translate is just barely useful. Whenever I use it to translate to English, what I get is generally poor. It's good enough to understand the gist of what the original text said, but that's about it. Fortunately, most of the time, understanding the gist is enough.
Post reply on HN