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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   4829 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.

Not commenting on this directly, but I remember back at $UNIVERSITY (a top 100 school) listening to a math professor discuss career prospects for math majors. On one hand, they could go into academia, get paid peanuts, but get all the fame of publishing their work. On the other, they could work for The Nation's Top Employer Of Mathematicians, get paid well to work with really really smart folks on hard problems, but have to suffer in 10-20 years when someone else published the same results in open academic literature that they couldn't ever talk about, and never get credit for.

Or they could go into finance, but that mostly just paid well and was boring from a research perspective.

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