Comment by evolve2k

6 hours ago

Wasn’t their translations project “pre AI”? That’s not running an LLM is it?

It's not an LLM but it is a tiny pre-trained ML model running inside the browser. Funded by the EU and made in partnership with a few European universities as well: https://mozilla.github.io/translations/docs/

Their level of acceptance for releasing a new model (AKA new language support) is to benchmark within 5% difference of Google Translate, basically proving you don't need an external party to do good-enough translations for you. It's like the coolest thing they worked on recently.

Most modern translation tools are language models and this was true even before the LLM chatbot explosion. The difference is they were trained on smaller (and less dubiously sourced) datasets and the output that was trained for was translations directly rather than conversations.