I wasn't too clear, I think. Apologies if the wording was confusing.

People who started their NLP work (PhDs etc; industry research projects) before the LLM / transformer craze had to adapt to the new world. (Hence 'post-mass-uptake-of-transformers')

Ah ok, then I did misunderstand a lot. That makes sense. And I do like the non AI based NLP work.

I think you're misinterpreting: "with the advent of transformers, (many) people doing NLP with pre-transformers techniques had to salvage their shit"

I guess. That's why I added the "unless I am mis-interpreting", still got downvoted for it because I guess it was against AI. The wording was confusing but so was my understanding of it as a non-native speaker. Shit happens.

I agree that the wording was a bit confusing (as a native speaker).

There's no post-transformer tech. There are lots of NLP tasks that you can now, just, prompt an LLM to do.

Yeah unclear wording; see the sibling comment also. I meant "the tech we have now", in the era after "attention is all you need"