Comment by MacNCheese23
4 days ago
The same fate hit deepl. What most english users don't know is that translation from english to another language was always at best - horrible and not usable without much manual effort. The same goes the other way around when you are writing technical documents.
Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german<->english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.
It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.
But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.
Looks like approx 7 years ago was DeepL's first Series A - https://tracxn.com/d/companies/deepl/__mTFDDSjOlFbUE5DY_w1NW... - they got funding from btov and Benchmark
Benchmark is very AI-pilled: https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/ai-is-replacing-j... and is very bullish on it, too: https://gtmnow.com/benchmark-ai-startup-investing-chetan-put...
it also looks like DeepL went from using a CNN engine to an LLM in 2024 (coinciding with its $2 billion valuation and Series C) which is likely why it seems to hallucinate a lot more now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepL_Translator#Translation_m...