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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?

#291

Post by prottog »

glasss wrote: post #274
HPsquared wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only about 1% of workers are on minimum wage, you wouldn't expect an average lifestyle from that.

Very anecdotal, but I don't know anyone making minium wage for my area. I do know tons of people making within 1-2 dollars of minimum wage though. If we divvy up the data into groups like that, I wonder how much that 1% jumps.

I don't know how accurate this data is, but this website[0] breaks the US average down to single percentiles, and has detailed data for many metro areas, as well.

[0]: https://dqydj.com/average-median-top-household-income-percen...

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

#292

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

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.

Google translate lets you correct a translation, right?

Did people stop doing this at some point? Maybe after the advent of massively addictive social media, people more often ended up screenshotting it and sharing it for likes instead of correcting it.

I'm sure Google have stats on this but no idea whether they're public.

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

#293

Post by bgroat »

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,…

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 sounded like gibberish.

I think GPT is like my son, and all tech people are like excited parents.

Maybe the kid will learn to speak like an adult, but it can't yet

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

#294

Post by r_klancer »

laserlight wrote: post #69
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less bullshit jobs. Society needs doctors, nurses, plumbers and teachers not tech bros.

AI or technology won't reduce bullshit jobs. To the contrary, they might increase bullshit jobs, because there would be more resources to allocate for those jobs.

Yes, yes, yes. My wife (who teaches humanities) keeps asking me if AI is going to take all the jobs. I keep saying society has already had to deal with the fact that not that many people are required to build the things and grow the food, and we adapted by inventing all kinds of vaguely bullshit jobs, and jobs to provide services to the people who get their money from bullshit jobs, and all of those jobs spread the wealth around. There will be more and more of those (and, to be clear, many more people who aren't in a position to get one.)

Still better to train lots of electricians and refrigerant techs and solar installers and all the other workers that the energy transition will need, of course.

Also have yet to Graeber's book ("Bullshit Jobs: A Theory").

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

#295

Post by avmich »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #118
avmich wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 yo…

The question was about the case "when these sorts of things happen". This is a generalization which assumes something analogous happened in the past. We're not talking narrowly about something which could "automate too many things that only humans could previously do", which we didn't have before ChatGPT, at least in such a short time. We're talking about similar, but not the same, things and PC revolution seems like a good example.

So it would be good to see the parallels with 1980-s here, if this generalization holds.

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

#296

Post by UncleEntity »

xwolfi wrote: post #210
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,…

Come on, we could do it when we abandonned the horses, we can do it again.

Unless you’re the horse.

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

#297

Post by sterlind »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #270
pcthrowaway wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's the economy, it's the policy. Automating a shit-ton of jobs is great for the economy. The economy is just fine if 90% of people are starving because big corps are saving shit-tons of money. The government of a wealthy country should ensure that its citizens are able to eat, and have a sheltered place to sleep, without them needing to work. Because the way things are going, there won't be enough wor…

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…

how much of that work requires physical labor? when I think of the work to be done, I think of like, building roads and houses and factories, transitioning to renewable energy, staffing hospitals with doctors and nurses, picking up trash on the street, cleaning up oceans, research in biology and pharmacology.

I don't really think of filing paperwork, or writing code, or meetings in general. It's the stuff that requires arms and legs and fingers that's our bottleneck. ChatGPT can't help with that. Robots can, but RL is lagging.

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

#298

Post by xdennis »

pohuing wrote: post #14
davidktr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow German here. Funny thing about DeepL: It translates "pathetisch" as "pathetic". For example: "Das war eine pathetische Rede." -> "That was a pathetic speech." I guess we have to get used to software redefining the meaning of words. It was kind of funny when that happened regarding Google Maps / neighborhood names, but with LLMs it's a different ballgame.

Pathetic can mean emotional in English as well. Though I only discovered that by reading the dictionary. For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned.

> For anyone who doesn't speak German, pathetisch means with pathos, impassioned.

It's the same in Romanian, and I guess many other languages.

Many of the common words of European languages are derived from Greek and Latin, and where the meaning has diverged in English, now (because of its ubiquity) these false friends are being realigned to mean what they do in English.

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

#299

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

Yeah also considering the article on Ars today about people testing whether ChatGPT poses no harm. I think singularity is coming but much differently than anticipated. So yes, the economy will have to change massively and less work hours are needed. (And the concepts are there: Negative Income tax, Universal basic income...) The change will be more graceful the less everybody is in denial.

As mentioned elsewhere this is not the first technological disruption in the economy. The change from heavy industry to a service industry didn't go well, hopefully it's possible to take learnings from this and do it right this time.

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

#300

Post by smrtinsert »

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…

How did GPS tracking companies survive Google and Google Maps? I think there will probably be many niches to explore even as the big names work hard to compete and eventually commoditize LLMs
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