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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?

#321

Post by hd95489 »

p1necone wrote: post #308
aleph_minus_one wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really striking though that a person graduating high school in say, 1970, could easily pick from a number of career choices even without doing college or even learning an in-demand trade, like plumbing, welding, etc. [...] Those are the days that are super gone Isn't this rather a strong argument for the claim that what high school as of today teaches is a strong mismatch with what the labour market demands? I…

Schools have always been like that. There's a reason that all of those skilled trades require multi year apprenticeships. School teaches everybody to read, write and reason about things in general to a decent level. You can't teach high school kids the basics of all the careers out there beyond stuff that's generally applicable - you wouldn't have the time or the equipment. And schools do often have elective shop, co…

You can you just choose to treat them as infants for insurance and liability reasons

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

#322

Post by timeon »

seydor wrote: post #201
qwerty3344 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

white collar workers detest these jobs the only reason they studied, went to university etc was to avoid doing manual labour. this has been happening for decades, a century. they ll be depressed

> the only reason they studied

I was just curios.

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

#323

Post by hd95489 »

pxc wrote: post #150
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,…

> 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? And it doesn't mean that the replacements will be much better, or even as good as the Humana they repla…

A lot of those jobs exist for legal compliance reasons and are cost center. Every company in the world wants to make them as shitty and cheap as possible but remain compliant. Right now the floor is minimum wage but soon it will be gpt chat

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

#324

Post by throwaway2037 »

amrocha wrote: post #198
prottog wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

GP said "barber". You said "minimum wage". I'm confused. GP is saying (I think) that you can live well outside a big city on working class wages.

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

#326

Post by dr_dshiv »

sterlind wrote: post #297
dr_dshiv wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 requir…

> 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

All that takes knowledge work. Physical too, but most of the cost today is knowledge work.

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

#327

Post by jll29 »

yyyk wrote: post #158
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,…

There are three 'markets' for translators: * Verbal translation, where accuracy is usually important enough to want to also have a human onboard since humans still have an easier time with certain social clues. * High-culture translation, where there's a lot to personal choice and explaining it. GPT can give out many versions but can't yet sufficiently explain its reasoning, nor would its tastes necessarily match tha…

A Chinese washing machine manufacturer may not hesitate to use MT (Google Translate, chatGPT or otherwise) to translate the instruction manual to English.

In some cases, the quality may not go down or even go up (we've probably all seen some pretty bad human translations).

"AI" is not the only automation that threatens translation jobs: translation memories (plain ol' databases that remember past translations) have killed a lot of business for human translators, namely re-translating new versions of products, where not a lot has changed. Nowadays, they only get paid for the sentences that were modified compared to the previous version ("the diff"). SDL Trados is an example of this simple approach that is extremely effective, and used heavily e.g. by the European Commission's translation service.

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

#328

Post by Frog0fWar »

org3 wrote: post #126
mashygpig wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

https://portal.konjer.xyz/

Wow! I guess some of the answers on questions I tried were pretty generic, but I can already see a value in it, and it's only a beginning.

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

#329

Post by chpatrick »

timoth3y wrote: post #202
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,…

The problem is not that automation will eliminate our jobs. The problem is that we have created an economy where that is a bad thing.

What will the economy look like when the peak intelligence on the planet doesn't care about anything we do?

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

#330

Post by harold_b »

1attice wrote: post #204
WalterBright wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine the devastation wrought by automatic looms, that put all the weavers out of a job! 97% of jobs used to be working on the farm. Now it's something like 2%.

This hoary take irks me. There were still places for human endeavour to go when the looms were automated. That is no longer the case. Think of it instead as cognitive habitat. Sure, there has been habitat loss in the past, but those losses have been offset by habitat gains elsewhere. This time, I don't see anywhere for habitat gains to come, and I see a massive, enormous, looming (ha!) cognitive habitat loss. -- EDIT…

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