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?

#181

Post by xp84 » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 9:59 PM UTC

mbgerring wrote: post #174

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…

You can still do that with plumbing and welding

Sorry, my phrasing was bad. Totally agree, even today trades are still AMAZING for this. I meant even if you were to set aside the trades, 50 years ago there was plenty of stuff you could at least support a family on without even that level of specialized skill. You could "start in the mailroom" or on the sales floor and end up in middle management after 20 years, in a variety of companies, most of which don't even exist anymore, or if they do, they employ far fewer workers domestically today due to a combo of offshoring and automation.

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

#182

Post by prottog » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 9:59 PM UTC

xp84 wrote: post #149

csa wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think a lot of our current sociological problems, problems associated with wealth inequality, etc., I see where you’re coming from, but is this really the main source of the inequality? Based on numbers relating to workers’ diminishing share of profits, it seems to be that the capital class has been able to take a bigger piece of the profit pie without sharing. In the past, companies have shared profits more wide…

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 possible to do in wide swathes of the country outside of the tier-one cities that have global competition trying to get in and live there, as long as you make prudent choices.

I think 20- to 30-something engineers who have spent their entire adult lives in major coastal cities have a huge blind spot to how middle America lives.

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

#183

Post by esperent » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 9:59 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…

Google translate works amazingly will on languages with a similar grammar (or at least, it works so on European languages, which I have the experience to judge).

However, translation of more distant languages is pretty terrible. Vietnamese to English is something I use Google translate for everyday and it's a mess. I can usually guess what the intended meaning was but if you're translating a paragraph or more it won't even be able to translate the same important subject words consistently throughout. Throw in any kind of slang or abbreviations (which Vietnamese people use a lot when messaging each other) and it's completely lost.

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

#184

Post by mostlysimilar » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 10:01 PM UTC

malermeister wrote: post #175

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,…

> given our current economic systems, how are these people supposed to eat? I've said it before and I'll say it again. This right here is the crux of the issue. The only way people get to eat is if we change the economic systems. Capitalism supercharged by AI will lead to misery for almost everyone, with a few Musks, Bezoses and Thiels being our neofeudal overlords. The only hope is a complete break in economic syste…

It will take massive cooperation. Given how rough it was to make it through the pandemic... how can we hope to come together on something this daunting?

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

#185

Post by qwerty3344 » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 10:02 PM UTC

jurassic wrote: post #180

Maybe this is alarmist, but I don't see how LLMs don't collapse our entire economic system over the next decade or so. This is coming for all of us, not just the NLP experts in big company research groups. Being able to cheaply/instantly perform virtually any task is great until you realize there is now nobody left to buy your product or service because the entire middle class has been put out of work by LLMs. And th…

There are entire sectors of the economy that LLMs can't touch - hospitality, manufacturing, caregivers, religious sectors, live-action entertainment, etc. Sure some of these will be replaced by robots but there will always be new jobs too.

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

#186

Post by jurassic » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 10:05 PM UTC

qwerty3344 wrote: post #185

jurassic wrote: post #180

Maybe this is alarmist, but I don't see how LLMs don't collapse our entire economic system over the next decade or so. This is coming for all of us, not just the NLP experts in big company research groups. Being able to cheaply/instantly perform virtually any task is great until you realize there is now nobody left to buy your product or service because the entire middle class has been put out of work by LLMs. And th…

There are entire sectors of the economy that LLMs can't touch - hospitality, manufacturing, caregivers, religious sectors, live-action entertainment, etc. Sure some of these will be replaced by robots but there will always be new jobs too.

No, there are not. Everything in the economy is connected and you can't have a vibrant industry without customers. The customers of hospitality/entertainment/healthcare/etc businesses are largely the middle class who will be put out of work by LLMs. So the person who today makes $200/night in tips waiting tables at a nice restaurant.... who will be buying those meals?

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

#187

Post by tippytippytango » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 10:06 PM UTC

Not even experts in the domain could see themselves being replaced and pivot in time. What hope does an ordinary person have in preparing for what’s coming? Telling people to retrain will not be an acceptable answer because no one can predict which skills will be safe from AI in 5 years.

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

#188

Post by malermeister » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 10:08 PM UTC

mostlysimilar wrote: post #184

malermeister wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> given our current economic systems, how are these people supposed to eat? I've said it before and I'll say it again. This right here is the crux of the issue. The only way people get to eat is if we change the economic systems. Capitalism supercharged by AI will lead to misery for almost everyone, with a few Musks, Bezoses and Thiels being our neofeudal overlords. The only hope is a complete break in economic syste…

It will take massive cooperation. Given how rough it was to make it through the pandemic... how can we hope to come together on something this daunting?

I hope I'm wrong, but I worry that the change will come the same way it came to Tsarist Russia or to the Ancien Régime.

Things will get worse and worse until they boil over.

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

#189

Post by levidos » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #68

goethes_kind wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my post is more representative of the truth than yours. I am sure you are telling the truth, but these unique talents you are talking about are not representative of the bulk of people working in research.

(My posting rate limit went away) The demand for AI/ML will fast outstrip available talent. We'll be pulling students right out of undergrad if they can pass an interview. I'm hiring folks off Reddit and 4chan that show an ability to futz with PyTorch and read papers. Also, from your sibling comment: > Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany. Huge factor. US cares about getting work done and little els…

I'm DevOps engineer and I became super interested in AI recently. Any tips on how can I shift to an AI/ML career?

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

#190

Post by mr_toad » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 10:09 PM UTC

jll29 wrote: post #154

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,…

> 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 have been doing NLP since 1993. Before ca. 1996, there were mostly rule-based systems that were just toys. They lacked robustness. Then statistical systems came up and things like spell-checking (considering context when doing it), part of speech tagging and eventually even pa…

> Another issue is that for many tasks, no much data is actually available. The big corps like Google/Meta etc. push the big ¨foundational¨ models because in the consumer space there is ample data available. But there are very important segments (notably in the professional space - applications for accountants, lawyers, journalists, pharmacologists - all of which I have conducted projects in/for), where training data can be constructed for a lot of money, but it will never reach the size of the set of today`s FB likes.

This is a really important point. GPT-x knows nothing about my database schema, let alone the data in that schema, it can’t it learn it, and it’s too big to fit in a prompt.

Until we have AI that can learn on the job it’s like some delusional consultant who thinks they have all the solutions on day 1 and understands nothing about the business.