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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?

#371

Post by 1attice »

WalterBright wrote: post #360
1attice wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the same will not be true this time This prediction has occurred with every technology revolution. It hasn't been borne out yet. > the sort of undergrad maneuver It's a variation of the broken window fallacy.

> This prediction has occurred with every technology revolution. It hasn't been borne out yet.

So what? You are performing 'induction from history', which is possibly the hand-waviest possible means of estimating what is next to occur.

Discontinuities occur. Fire gets tamed. Alphabets get invented. What went before is only a solid guide to the future absent any major disruption to the status quo. There is no a-priori reason to think that this time will be the same, either. Burden of proof is yours.

> It's a variation of the broken window fallacy.

I appreciate parsimony as much as the next academic but I'd appreciate you fleshing out your position here, so I can take it apart at the joints, in the custom and manner of my people >:)

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

#372

Post by [deleted] »

astockwell wrote: post #235
swatcoder wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 guidanc…

If they are accurate for ~80% of the questions, they will be as accurate as any 1st or 2nd line help desk.

[deleted]

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

#373

Post by mdip »

Fascinating -- I think the comments on the HN post are almost as good.

I think everyone mostly agrees that AI is coming for a lot of jobs. There's disagreement about how many, how it will impact society and the like.

The pace of technology is not linear, it accelerates. I've never seen something that has so rapidly crossed into the "magical" territory as "nearly every single big LLM/Generative AI thing" seems to. It redefines what was previously laughably impossible ... a decade ago.

We're riding a curve upward that is making it extremely hard to see what's coming next. All of the pontificating, all of the attempts at finding solutions to imagined problems ... I can't see one that doesn't feel like a blindfolded person aiming at what they were told was a dart board with what they were told was a dart. There's really nothing to do but hang on and hope you land where any new opportunities creep up.

Expect bubbles, black swans, and purple unicorns.

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

#374

Post by iudqnolq »

astockwell wrote: post #346
bee_rider wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. Hypothetically if a human on first line help desk gives advice that is so completely bad as to be a crime, are they liable or the company? Because I guess a chat-bot would definitely not be liable.

How often is your fast food order 100% correct?

Correctness isn't one-dimensional. A wrong fast-food order might substitute or leave something out. There's essentially no chance the employee will swap in a random product from some other store.

But in this example the AI could hallucinate a statement attributed to you it actually formed by putting together reddit comments.

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

#375

Post by tinyhouse »

dongobread wrote: post #107

I worked in a research capacity in the voice assistant org of a big tech company until very recently. There was a lot of panic when ChatGPT came out, as it became clear that the vast bulk of the org's modeling work and research essentially had no future. I feel bad for some of my colleagues who were really specialized in specific NLP technology niches (e.g. building NLU ontologies) which have been made totally obsole…

What's analytical modeling?

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

#376

Post by impalallama »

csa wrote: post #135
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 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…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/11/technology/income-inequal...

Yes this tech may not eliminate jobs, but the jobs remaining will be indefinite less skilled easier to replace, or outsource

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

#377

Post by WalterBright »

KyeRussell wrote: post #362
WalterBright wrote: post #353

I see chatGPT as eliminating an awful lot of drudgery. For example, back in the 60's my dad was working on his book. The text was typed out double spaced, and he (and others) would make corrections. After a while, my mom would retype the whole thing. Imagine typing a whole book. Again and again and again. She'd type hour after hour. It's dehumanizing. And then came word processors. What a magical revolution! You coul…

It sounds like you’re giving a lot of human ‘occupations’ a whole lot of undeserved credit. There are stark differences between these two scenarios. Remixing existing ideas in an incredibly abstract way is not drudgery, it’s what a lot of people do, and get enjoyment out of.

AI will automate the drudgery end, which is not "incredibly" anything.

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

#378

Post by WalterBright »

jnwatson wrote: post #249
moffkalast wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't wait for the economy that is 97% twitch streamers because that's all what humans are left qualified for. /s

I saw a stream the other day that was just the output of an AI trained on a popular streamer’s past streams. It would select a random clip for video, respond to viewers’ comments in the voice of the streamer. It even superimposed roughly corresponding lip movements on the video.

I've listed to some popular podcasters. Over time, they all run out of material and their newer podcasts are just rehashes of the old ones. I suppose AI will take over that job!

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

#379

Post by counters »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #262
jll29 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

"I think that is not merited. Deep neural models have their own set of problems," But I think that is the issue...going forward wouldn't you hire a machine learning specialist rather than an NLP specialist for those problems? As far industry goes, is there any value in all the syntax/semantics/phonology theory NLP folks command?

I don't think so. In practice, you'll need to hire _both_ the domain expert and the ML specialist. Or maybe even no change at all... you still want the domain expert, because the problems may be fundamentally related to the framing of the task the AI system is trying to solve, not the model architecture or training/fine-tuning.

You definitely see this in the weather space. Despite flashy headlines, AI has really failed to make much of a difference at core weather forecasting, because the specialized statistical systems that combine many numerical weather prediction models are so greatly refined to the generic forecasting problem that there is little room for improvement. And AI practitioners rarely even focus on the actual interesting problems in the field where we suspect there can be huge gains - like convective initiation (predicting where exactly storms will form and their potential phase trajectory, e.g. what is the probably it will go tornadic or produce large hail?). The reality is that meteorologists can refine the prediction task so precisely that you don't need innovative, brand new model architectures. And the crazy brand new pure DL/data-driven models like NVIDIA's FourCastNet or DeepMind's GraphCast have a long way to go to be a practical competitor to traditional NWP and basic post-processing/statistical bias correction.

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

#380

Post by majormajor »

brutus1213 wrote: post #369
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…

Look .. I am one of the working class here. But I gotta point out. Our standard of living is far superior to someone living in 1970 when it comes to stuff/technology. The stuff is cheaper because of China/globalization. The tech is there because we outsourced production and kept specializing the work force. I don't think UBI is the solution. Nor is squeezing people more than they are being squeezed. Efficiency and pr…

Standard of living shouldn't be judged purely in terms of "stuff"; that's not how human brains work. There's relative effects ("keeping up with the joneses") as well as the effects of having options and possibilities for advancement ("American dream"). Make those things less accessible and people will feel less well off.

And outside of electronics a lot of physical-goods/land stuff is less attainable in many places in the country anyway.

The problem with non-redistributive approaches is that generational wealth rarely goes away. So if you don't have it, the number of people who don't have to try to out-spend you for whatever you want only goes up as time passes.

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