NLP is all you need #ND26

NLP - Natural Language Processing has seen tremendous growth in the last couple of years. I believe there are certain factors that might have caused this uptick in NLP and this edition NullData Newsletter discusses that.

Before this, The domain that was seeing an uprising was CV - Computer Vision but suddenly NLP started to rise. The start difference between these two domains is the Data Availability. NLP which deals with Text (typically Natural Language Text) is quite vast and available almost everywhere. While for CV, We need Image data whose volume isn’t as same as Text.

Say, you see an FB post with an Image, It’s highly possible that you’d have seen at least a 3x more Text posts and Images with Texts.

No, This isn’t Michael Bay’s Transformers. The paper “Attention is All you Need” introduced a new time of Neural Architecture, Transformers in 2017 and as of today the paper has got totally ~19K Citations which is a testament to the high correlation of rise of Transformers and rise of NLP. This also gave rise to a family of BERT models which suddenly started finding its way in a lot of Applications.

Open Source Company - It’s a word you wouldn’t often hear because most open source projects aren’t companies and most companies aren’t primarily open source projects. But thanks to the rise of NLP and its close ties with projects like Hugging Face, Rasa and so on - which are proper companies but also heavily invested in the open source ecosystem. I’m not a big fan of startups raising fund but I was super happy when I saw Hugging Face and Rasa raising funds because this will lead to this new breed of Open Source Company that will lead to more sustainable open source projects while a lot of people working for it get paid well, which I believe is fair.

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