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Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

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Re: Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

#21

Post by The_rationalist »

I observe the state of the art on most Nlp tasks since many years: In 2018,2019 there was huge progress made each year on most tasks. 2020,except for a few tasks have mostly stagnated... NLP accuracy is generally not production ready but the pace of progress was quick enough to have huge hopes. The root cause of the evil is: Nobody has build upon the state of the art pre trained language: XLnet while there are hundreds of declinaisons of BERTs. Just because of Google being behind it, if XLnet was owned by Google 2020 would have been different. I also believe that pre trained language have reached a plateau and we need new original ideas such as bringing variational autoencoder to Nlp and using metaoptimizers such as Ranger.

The most pathetic one is that: Many major Nlp tasks have old SOTA in BERT just because nobody cared of using (not improving) XLnet on them which is absolute shame, I mean on many major tasks we could trivially win many percents of accuracy but nobody qualified bothered to do it,where goes the money then? To many NIH papers I guess.

There's also not enough synergies, there are many interesting ideas that just needs to be combined and I think there's not enough funding for that, it's not exciting enough...

I pray for 2021 to be a better year for AI, otherwise it will show evidence for a new AI progress winter

Re: Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

#22

Post by nibnalin »

arvindch wrote: post #16
arcanus wrote: post #4

This is an anecdote with no data. And the entire global economy is in a recession, so the fact deep learning might have fewer job postings isn't particular notable. I'll note that in my personal anecdote, the megacorps remain interested in and hiring in ML as much as ever.

He's now posted a follow-up analysis of LinkedIn Job postings: https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1300417952211034112?s=20

Would be interesting to see this dip relative to other tech subfields like javascript/react or even data science and other such keywords. Does anyone know of a public LinkedIn dataset?

The author disables tweet replies so I'm not sure where they get their numbers from.

Re: Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

#23

Post by the-dude »

cochne wrote: post #20
insomniacity wrote: post #5

Some context, for those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

The poster explicitly states he does not think this is indicative of AI winter.

Mentioning context does not mean the OP assumes equivalence.

It is context.

Re: Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

#25

Post by mattkrause »

abrichr wrote: post #18
hprotagonist wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least some is pure 2020. we want to hire, we can’t right now.

Why not? I would have thought it was a buyer’s market now with all the layoffs.

If it weren't urgent (i.e., lost a job) I'd be a little reluctant to join a company/team that I'd never met in person.

I can imagine that others would be equally reluctant to hire someone they've only seen through Zoom.

Re: Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

#27

Post by make3 »

itg wrote: post #14
make3 wrote: post #10

the fact that he doesn't allow people to answer his tweets making data-less claims like this is really a problem

He labels anyone who criticizes him as a troll. Unfortunately he is a public figure in the ML space and does have his share of trolls, but doesn't take too well to even well thought out replies.

he's so French, in the worse way possible. I say that as a French person myself

Re: Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

#28

Post by eric_b »

I've worked in lots of big corps as a consultant. Every one raced to harness the power of "big data" ~7 years ago. They couldn't hire or spend money fast enough. And for their investment they (mostly) got nothing. The few that managed to bludgeon their map/reduce clusters in to submission and get actionable insights discovered... they paid more to get those insights than they were worth!

I think this same thing is happening with ML. It was a hiring bonanza. Every big corp wanted to get an ML/AI strategy in place. They were forcing ML in to places it didn't (and may never) belong. This "recession" is mostly COVID related I think - but companies will discover that ML is (for the vast majority) a shiny object with no discernible ROI. Like Big Data, I think we'll see a few companies execute well and actually get some value, while most will just jump to the next shiny thing in a year or two.

Re: Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

#29

Post by lacker »

The_rationalist wrote: post #21

I observe the state of the art on most Nlp tasks since many years: In 2018,2019 there was huge progress made each year on most tasks. 2020,except for a few tasks have mostly stagnated... NLP accuracy is generally not production ready but the pace of progress was quick enough to have huge hopes. The root cause of the evil is: Nobody has build upon the state of the art pre trained language: XLnet while there are hundre…

Could you give an example of a major task that you think the state of the art could be trivially improved on with the xlnet approach?

Re: Deep learning job postings have collapsed in the past six months

#30

Post by dpflan »

The_rationalist wrote: post #21

I observe the state of the art on most Nlp tasks since many years: In 2018,2019 there was huge progress made each year on most tasks. 2020,except for a few tasks have mostly stagnated... NLP accuracy is generally not production ready but the pace of progress was quick enough to have huge hopes. The root cause of the evil is: Nobody has build upon the state of the art pre trained language: XLnet while there are hundre…

Thanks for the information. Do you know how the pandemic affected research output for 2020?
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