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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?

#81

Post by osigurdson »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #56
osigurdson wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "solution looking for a problem to solve" I wonder if this is a bad as everyone thinks. When a new technology arrives which is not completely understood, isn't the right approach to try to find some applications for it? Sure, most will fail, but some valid use cases will likely emerge. I'm pretty sure almost all technologies at some point were solutions looking for a problem to solve. Examples include the internet…

> I wonder if this is a bad as everyone thinks. I think it is. If they actually do end up finding a problem to solve, that would be serendipitous but I imagine the vast majority of the time they find themselves in the business of trying to convince the rest of us to buy a thing that we don’t need. And while the latter may drive the economy to some degree as I get older I detest it more and more.

No one actually needs anything - perhaps food and water but even survival is not strictly necessary.

The problem with “stuff we don’t need” arguments is they are fundamentally nihilistic.

Everyone needs a flying car so let’s get on with it.

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

#82

Post by Der_Einzige »

goethes_kind wrote: post #41
echelon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these people don't understand how hireable and desirable they are now. They need to get out of academia and plugged into AI positions at tech companies and startups. Their value just went up tremendously, even if their PhD thesis got cancelled. Easily millionaires waiting to happen. --- edit: Can't respond to child comment due to rate limit, so editing instead. > That is not how it works at all. Speak for yoursel…

That is not how it works at all. You won't get hired if you don't have the academic pedigree in the first place. That means a completed Ph.D and good publications in good journals.

Sorry, you don't need the Ph.D. publications at top 10 NLP venues are enough

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

#83

Post by siva7 »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #28
echelon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Honestly, I can't wait for GPT and other productivity tools to wrech havock upon the tech labour market. Some people in tech really need to be taken down a notch or two. That's an odd reason to want this.

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

You do realise those tech "bros" are what enables doctors, nurses, plumbers and teachers to have a better work-life?

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

#84

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

I'm not at a big tech company, and we don't sell algorithms, but my team does use a lot of NLP stuff in internal algorithms. The only panic I have is trying to keep up and take the time to learn the new stuff. If anything, things like GPT-4 are going to make my team 10x more successful without having to hire an army of PhDs.

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

#85

Post by visarga »

version_five wrote: post #29
djous wrote: post #18

During my master's degree in data science, we had several companies visit our faculty to recruit students. Not a single one was a specialized NLP company, but many of them had NLP projects going on. Most of those projects were the usual "solution looking for a problem to solve". Even those projects that might have had _some_ utility, would have been way more effective to buy/license a product than to develop an in-ho…

those projects were just PR so that c-levels could sell how they were preparing their company for a digital world This is exactly it. The 2017-2019 corporate version of "invest in AI" meant to build an in-house team to do ML experiments on internal data, and then usually evolved a bit to get some "ml-ops" thrown in so they could "deploy" the models they built. I spent some time with a few companies doing this and it…

You tend to oversimplify the GPT's - they don't just work all the time, you got to test how well they work, then you got to select the best prompt and demonstrations, then you got to update your prompt it as new data comes along. There is plenty of work parsing various inputs into a format it could understand and then parsing its outputs, especially for information extraction.

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

#86

Post by siva7 »

davidkuennen wrote: post #38
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.

The most amazing thing about ChatGPT translation is, that you can even instruct it how to translate. For example "dutzen" and "sietzen" in German. I just simply tell it how it should do it and it did. Absolutely amazing. It's like actually working with a real translator.

That's something i'm really sorry for but those jobs will be likely the first to fade away, there is a whole university faculty dedicated to the profession of the language translator where i live.

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

#87

Post by [deleted] »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #61
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree with your sentiment but disagree that AI research is in any way the domain of tech bros. I’m starting to see the term “tech bros” appear more and more in HN - before hand I more frequently saw it outside of this site. Some people on HN I have seen really come down on those that use the term. I don’t. Perhaps those of us in the industry ought to recognize that the term exists because of a growing resentment am…

[deleted]

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

#88

Post by meany »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #61
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I agree with your sentiment but disagree that AI research is in any way the domain of tech bros. I’m starting to see the term “tech bros” appear more and more in HN - before hand I more frequently saw it outside of this site. Some people on HN I have seen really come down on those that use the term. I don’t. Perhaps those of us in the industry ought to recognize that the term exists because of a growing resentment am…

It's evidence of resentment, but not of well reasoned discourse against something the tech industry is doing. Characterizations like this anthropomorphize a group into a single entity that is easier to hate and assign intentions, too. It's not constructive to any conversation that moves a discussion forward. A person who is mad at "tech bros" is likely more upset about systemic forces that they want to blame on a target. It's logically equivalent to making sweeping statements blaming immigrants for suppressed wages.

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

#89

Post by siva7 »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #40
echelon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get out of academia and into industry. Why the hell stay in in academia? This is clearly the next technological wave, and you shouldn't sleep on it. Especially when you're so well positioned to take advantage of your experience. You can make $500,000/yr (maybe more with all the new startups and options) and be on the bleeding edge. If you want to go back to academia later, you can comfortably do so. Most don't, but t…

If you go into industry you’ll be given a chance to deploy these models and rush them into products. You’ll also make good money. If you go into academia (or research, whether it’s in academia or industry) you’ll be given the chance to try to understand what they’re doing. I can see the appeal of making money and rushing products out. But it wouldn’t even begin to compete with my curiosity. Makes me wish I was younge…

This is as likely to happen as that someone will fully understand how the brain works. I don't think you're missing much out in academia

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

#90

Post by visarga »

goethes_kind wrote: post #63
Yoric wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hired in academia? Sure. Hired in industry. That's the opposite. I've had a friend who had to hide that they had a PhD to be hired...

I guess we are living in two different universes. Any job ad for an ML role or ML adjacent role says Ph.d required or Ph.d preferable. Maybe it is also a matter of location. I am in Germany. For a plain SWE role a Ph.d might be a disadvantage here too, but for anything ML related it is mandatory from what I can see.

In my hiring experience as an interviewer, 90% of candidates with PhD or not will actually have mediocre grasp on ML. It is a rare happy day when I get a good candidate. We interview for months for one hire. I got to interview candidates worldwide so I've seen people from many countries.
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