Baldur BjarnasonFeb 20
We used to have working spelling and grammar checkers. Why does everybody in tech pretend you need a whole-ass LLM to check for typos?
Show threadwikiyuFeb 20
@baldur
And translations
And text to speech was working good in most cases
Show threadMarcus MüllerFeb 20
@wikiyu @baldur no offense, but LLMs are really really good at translations, compared to the state of the art before. (and e.g. Google Translate was a lot more LLM-style AI for years than people think)
Show threadMarcus MüllerFeb 20
@wikiyu @baldur (I'd argue that's probably the thing their design lends itself to rather well – analyzing which tokens in which context. Certainly will never reach human translator qualities, but saying "machine translation was good before", um, no, it really really wasn't.)
Show threadBaldur BjarnasonFeb 20
@funkylab @wikiyu I'm Icelandic and I know a bit of Danish and French, and I can tell you right now that for the languages I'm familiar with, LLM translators are worse, less accurate, and very prone to fabricate nonsense, than the non-LLMs they are replacing. Maybe they're great for other languages but they're horrible for the ones I know.
Show threadMarcus Müller

@baldur @wikiyu Color me really surprised; paragon and derivatives (at least for German) were definitely worse; I remember the (2008-ish?) surprise when ANN-based translations started to achieve higher rankings than purely Bayes-based/statistical methods.

(Oh and I do personally remember things like the Babylon spyware thing, which wasn't really good. IBM Watson didn't work as well as Google translate when that came out, for German<->English at least. I had played with Aperium in its earlier …

Feb 20 at 2:01pmPhanpy
Show threadMarcus MüllerFeb 20
@baldur @wikiyu days, wonder how it does these days. I imagine that's the technology you've got in mind when you think of non-LLM translation?)
Show threadBaldur BjarnasonFeb 20

@funkylab @wikiyu So, around the time the LLM bubble first began, there was a noticeable sharp decline in the performance of publicly available translation services (i.e. Google Translate and the like) when it came to translating most Nordic languages and it's generally gotten worse, not better, over time. It's become a running joke.

An important note here is that there is much much less text available for these languages in machine-readable form than even German or French.