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Comment by kulahan

6 days ago

Translation seems like the ideal application. It seems as though an LLM would truly have no issues integrating societal concepts, obscure references, pop culture, and more, and be able to compare it across culture to find a most-perfect translation. Even if it has to spit out three versions to perfectly communicate, it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of traditional translators already.

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kulahan

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crote  6 days ago

> it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of traditional translators already

Traditional machine translators, perhaps. Human translation is still miles ahead when you actually care about the quality of the output. But for getting a general overview of a foreign-language website, translating a menu in a restaurant, or communicating with a taxi driver? Sure, LLMs would be a great fit!

  • kulahan  6 days ago

    I should’ve been more clear that this is basically what I meant! The availability of the LLM is the real killer because yeah - most translation jobs are needed for like 15 minutes in a relatively low-stakes environment. Perfect for LLMs. That complex stuff will come later when verifiability is possible and fast.

  • carlosjobim  6 days ago

    Modern machine translators have been good enough for a few years now, to do business far more complicated than ordering food. I do business every day with people in foreign languages, using these tools. They are reliable.

  • og_kalu  6 days ago

    >Human translation is still miles ahead when you actually care about the quality of the output.

    The current SOTA LLMs are better than Traditional machine translators (there is no perhaps) and most human translators.

    If a 'general overview' is all you think they're good for, then you've clearly not seriously used them.

troupo  6 days ago

> It seems as though an LLM would truly have no issues integrating societal concepts, obscure references, pop culture, and more, and be able to compare it across culture to find a most-perfect translation.

Somehow LLMs can't do that for structured code with well defined semantics, but sure, they will be able to extract "obscure references" from speech/text

  • kulahan  6 days ago

    All these people who think this technology is already done evolving are so confusing. This has nothing to do with my statement even if it weren’t misleading to begin with.

    There is really not that much similar between trying to code and trying to translate emotion. At the very least, language “compiles” as long as the words are in a sensible order and maintain meaning across the start and finish.

    All they need to do now in order to be able to translate well is to have contextual knowledge to inform better responses on the translated end. They’ve been doing that for years, so I really don’t know what you’re getting at here.