Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 243 posts

Re: LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool

#61

Post by daedrdev »

wmeredith wrote: post #25
janalsncm wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really make me think. If LI was just business profile, jobs board, and chat with recruiters, how much engineering would they need? I’m not saying to go Twitter mode and fire everybody, but certainly much less than now. So for that extra revenue from the feed, a lot of it will be eaten up by salaries for extra engineers. All of the extra work is going towards something largely viewed as useless. Zooming out, I bet…

You should check this out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

And you should consider that it's probably junk. From the article:

   A 2021 study empirically tested several of Graeber's claims, such as that bullshit jobs were increasing over time and that they accounted for much of the workforce. Using data from the EU-conducted European Working Conditions Survey, the study found that a low and declining proportion of employees considered their jobs to be "rarely" or "never" useful.
Many jobs that appear bad are actually needed, often only because of regulatory requirements or because their importance is misunderstood.

Re: LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool

#62

Post by will-burner »

siva7 wrote: post #12

Somehow i feel sad for this AI model. All the others are trained on authentic content and this boy gets socialised on the most shallow content imaginable. Poor, socially awkward AI.

An LLM trained on LinkedIn posts would be good for comedic purposes if nothing else. It's unintentional comedy score would be extremely high. Would love to see a conversation between an LLM trained on LinkedIn posts and an LLM trained on X/Twitter posts.

Re: LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool

#63

Post by dspillett »

> I recommend opting out now

Little point. It'll be like facebook's opt-out and only cover things you post/update going forward. Everything you've already posted has already been slurped into the training set and won't be taken out and the model(s) retrained.

The only way to show disapproval in this sort of behaviour that they'll feel is to stop using services that use auto-opt-in for anything, and not enough people are likely to do that for it to be effective.

Re: LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool

#64

Post by nradov »

elawler24 wrote: post #60

I met one of the PMs building this. She was working on NL unified search for the feed. I noticed it’s gotten way better in the last few weeks. Instead of using Google to search [first name][last name][“linkedin”], now i can reliably type my query into LinkedIn’s search bar and get the correct result. I’m a fan.

Search by name has worked well on LinkedIn since forever. If the person I'm looking for has an account then they're almost always in the first page of search results.

Re: LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool

#67

Post by usefulcat »

theiz wrote: post #46
raffraffraff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth would you train AI on that ? In the social media world it's already the closest thing resembling boring, unreadable machine generated content. No matter what you ask it, it'll brag about what a great job it's doing answering you, announce that it's having a baby, then tell everybody that it's being let go because there are better AI. It'll thank a few key people who it worked with, and tell you that it's…

Because there is a huge market for resume builders and career guidance where AI can play a role. Using LinkedIn you can measure success and network performance and correlate that to the resume and posted content.

I was going to say that it's the streetlight effect but this makes even more sense.

Re: LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool

#69

Post by lordnacho »

janalsncm wrote: post #23
lordnacho wrote: post #14

LinkedIn is an business card / CV storage site, where you can find a job. If it was just a bunch of linked profiles with a job matching function, it would still be LinkedIn. But of course, you can't work at a place that does something that mundane without suggesting something that makes you look like Facebook or Twitter. You have to at least give people some sort of reason to see what their old colleagues are up to.…

It really make me think. If LI was just business profile, jobs board, and chat with recruiters, how much engineering would they need? I’m not saying to go Twitter mode and fire everybody, but certainly much less than now. So for that extra revenue from the feed, a lot of it will be eaten up by salaries for extra engineers. All of the extra work is going towards something largely viewed as useless. Zooming out, I bet…

Well I got invited to Twitter HQ back when it was still called that. It was some obscure team offering an app library of some sort, IIRC. It certainly wasn't something close to the main product.

I suspect there are a lot of these sorts of investments in the big players, a bunch of teams doing far-from-core things that someone thought was worthwhile.

Post reply on HN