Thoughts on NLP, search, and technology
Thanks to LLMs, everybody is now an expert. Thanks to LLMs everybody can (and should!) become a better expert in areas they care about. The conundrum of having this new tool which helps both in acting with more technical knowledge at your fingertips, but also changing both appearances and expectations of technicality, led me to writing this short piece poignantly called 'Are you Cosplaying as Technical?'
It is possible to automate the data-based writing of text in a similar but different fashion as it is possible to automate the data-based painting of diagrams. The bad news (for the reader) is that ahead is a wave of texts that are the writing equivalent of the 3D pie chart of the 1980s: sophisticated looks, but rightly criticized for the paucity of information and the shallow aftertaste.
After decades of Neural Network overhype, and a following time of disrespect, Neural Networks have become popular again — for a reason, as they can fit large amounts of data better than the feature-based models that came before them. Nonetheless, people who lived through the first overhyped episode are asking critical questions — the answers to which are (hopefully!) enlightening.
Personalizing search results leads to a situation where you're more likely to see content that you agree with - limiting the diversity in your intellectual diet. Clearly, we need to get away from this evil. But - can we?