I honestly don't get where the big deal is with NLP. So far the most useful application has been customer support chatbots and those still don't rise to the level of having an actual human that can understand the intricacies of your special request.
A lot of support requests aren't actually intricate and special: there's almost always loads of simple requests that come in again and again.
When you ask a request like that and get the answer instantly, that really is ML delivering value.
You mightn't think it, but a lot of people work in customer support, and spend a lot of time answering rote questions again and again.
People talk about how much hype there is, or the chance of another AI winter. Yes there's a ton of hype - but I think they aren't considering the real value already being delivered this time around.
Everyone is excited about GPT3, but there's already been amazing progress in practical NLP already, over the last few years.
Current NLP is bad. Still useful (Google search increasingly feels like it is doing NLP to change what I asked for into what it thinks I meant) but bad. A hypothetical future “perfect” NLP can demonstrate any skill that a human could learn by reading, and computers can read so much more than any given human.
That's just not even close to the only or most useful application.
I use NLP and associates s2s techniques every day. I struggle to see how so many people don't see the obvious benefits deep inference is bringing to stuff all around them.
