Ask HN: How do you cope with existential threat regarding career?
I spent months last year building algorithms to segment Chinese sentences into individual words (Chinese has no spaces) and disambiguate the meaning of the words (Chinese words often have many different translations). ChatGPT solved this problem practically as well as I have zero-shot. Here&#x27;s a very difficult example that&#x27;s not exactly correct, but better than what I could produce:<p>&gt; In the Chinese sentence &quot;这次公司裁员裁不到我头上.&quot; with the translation &quot;I won&#x27;t be fired during this round of layoffs.&quot;, list all the words separately with their individual word translations<p>这次 - this time,
公司 - company,
裁员 - layoffs,
裁不到 - won&#x27;t be fired,
我 - I,
头上 - during (literal translation: on top of the head)<p>I knew this day would be coming but since nothing was available at the time I had to try an implement a hodge-podge of algorithms to get the job done. But honestly, if I can integrate ChatGPT instead I&#x27;m kinda glad! Thousands of lines of code gone, a much simplified pipeline, and I can focus on higher level tasks instead. What&#x27;s important is the problem I&#x27;m trying to solve.<p>But it does show that a lot of NLP and CV tasks will be as simple as explaining what you want, and the result will mostly be good enough. But there will still be value in solving more unique problems, or knowing the best way to mold problems such as they fit the foundational models available, and knowing how to build on top of them.<p>To keep your sanity, my advice is have some problems in mind that you&#x27;re passionate about solving as well so that you diversity your mental investment.