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Comment by paulluuk | Hacker News Reader

It really depends on the use-case. I currently work in the video streaming industry, and my team has been building production-quality code for 2 years now. Here are some things that are going really well:

* Determine what is happening in a scene/video * Translating subtitles to very specific local slang * Summarizing scripts * Estimating how well a new show will do with a given audience * Filling gaps in the metadata provided by publishers, such as genres, topics, themes * Finding the most "viral" or "interesting" moments in a video (combo of LLM and "traditional" ML)

There's much more, but I think the general trend here is not "chatbots" or "fixing code", it's automating stuff that we used armies of people to do. And as we progress, we find that we can do better than humans at a fraction of the cost.

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Based on what you listed I would seriously consider the broader societal value of your work.

I know this is just a casual comment, but this is a genuine concern I have every day. However, I've been working for 10 years now and working in music/video streaming has been the most "societal value" I've had thus far.

I've worked at Apple, in finance, in consumer goods.. everywhere is just terrible. Music/Video streaming has been the closest thing I could find to actually being valuable, or at least not making the world worse.

I'd love to work at an NGO or something, but I'm honestly not that eager to lose 70% of my salary to do so. And I can't work in pure research because I don't have a PhD.

What industry do you work in, if you don't mind me asking?

It's not a casual comment in the sense that I have genuine concern every day that the current world we are living in is enabled by common employees. I'm not saying everyone should solve world hunger, "NGO or bust" - and yes, the job market is tough - but especially for software engineers, there are literally hundreds of thousands of companies requiring software work and who do net good or at least "plausible" harm, and pay an above average salary.

Also I only read the comment above, it's you who can judge what you contribute to and what you find fair. I just wish there were a mandatory "code of conduct" for engineers. The way AI is reshaping the field, I could imagine this becoming more like a medical/law field where this would be possible.

I work in IoT telemetrics. The company is rumored to partake in military contracts at a future point, that would be my exit then.

> Estimating how well a new show will do with a given audience

Can you elaborate on this point?

I work in R&D, and although I haven't signed an NDA, I think it's best if I don't elaborate too much. But basically we have a large dataset of shows and movies for which we already know how well they did with specific audiences, but we didn't know why exactly. So we use LLMs to reverse-engineer a large amount of metadata about these shows, and then use traditional ML to train a model that learns which feature appeal to which audiences.

Most stuff is obvious: nobody needs to tell you what segment of society is drawn to soap operas or action movies, for example. But there's plenty of room for nuance in some areas.

This doesn't guarantee that it actually becomes a succesful movie or show, though. That's a different project and frankly, a lot harder. Things like which actors, which writers, which directors, which studio are involved, and how much budget the show has.. it feels more like Moneyball but with more intangible variables.

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