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It's not the same as "AI replacing humans", but seems clear that the launch of ChatGPT led to dramatic cuts of NLP researchers. [1][2] For instance, at Hugging

It's not the same as "AI replacing humans", but seems clear that the launch of ChatGPT led to dramatic cuts of NLP researchers. [1][2] For instance, at HuggingFace: > A few days after that, Thom Wolf, who was my manager at Hugging Face and also one of the co-founders, messages me, “Hey, can you get on a call with me ASAP?” He told me that they had fired people from the research team and that the rest would either be doing pre-training or post-training — which means that you are either building a foundation model or you’re taking a foundation model and making it an instruction-following model, similar to ChatGPT. [1]: https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt-broke-an-entire-field-an-oral-history-20250430/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/when-chatgpt-broke-an-entire-... [2]: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11rizyb/d_anyone_else_witnessing_a_panic_inside_nlp_orgs/ https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/11rizyb/d_...

simonw 1y ago
That giant shock to the NLP research community is more than two years old now. It would be interesting to hear from people affected by that today, I'd like to know what they ended up doing in response.
- reasonableklout 1y ago
  That's true. From the quanta article it looks like many affected researchers went on to work on LLMs successfully. I do wonder how people are adjusting to similar, ongoing shocks across other industries. For instance, the ArtStation protest against AI art a couple years ago showed widespread hostility towards the technology. In the time since, AI art has only gotten better and been adopted more, but from articles like [1] it doesn't seem like concept artists have much benefitted. [1]: https://aftermath.site/ai-video-game-development-art-vibe-coding-midjourney https://aftermath.site/ai-video-game-development-art-vibe-co...
LPisGood 1y ago
That’s very odd. You’d think a breakthrough and surge of funding would massive boost NLP research - unless those researchers who not focused on LLMs and the company just wanted to move all resources to that.
ninkendo 1y ago
It’s only natural that a breakthrough new way of doing $thing would lead to dramatic cuts in people who are experts in the old way of doing $thing, right? Doesn’t matter what $thing is. (Tons of examples, automated phone switches replacing telephone operators, online booking sites replacing travel agents, etc etc.)

simonw 1y ago

That giant shock to the NLP research community is more than two years old now. It would be interesting to hear from people affected by that today, I'd like to know what they ended up doing in response.

reasonableklout 1y ago
That's true. From the quanta article it looks like many affected researchers went on to work on LLMs successfully. I do wonder how people are adjusting to similar, ongoing shocks across other industries. For instance, the ArtStation protest against AI art a couple years ago showed widespread hostility towards the technology. In the time since, AI art has only gotten better and been adopted more, but from articles like [1] it doesn't seem like concept artists have much benefitted. [1]: https://aftermath.site/ai-video-game-development-art-vibe-coding-midjourney https://aftermath.site/ai-video-game-development-art-vibe-co...

LPisGood 1y ago

That’s very odd. You’d think a breakthrough and surge of funding would massive boost NLP research - unless those researchers who not focused on LLMs and the company just wanted to move all resources to that.

ninkendo 1y ago

It’s only natural that a breakthrough new way of doing $thing would lead to dramatic cuts in people who are experts in the old way of doing $thing, right? Doesn’t matter what $thing is. (Tons of examples, automated phone switches replacing telephone operators, online booking sites replacing travel agents, etc etc.)