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bastardoperatorlast Tuesday at 5:22 PM3 repliesview on HN

All those things we had before AI?


Replies

criddelllast Tuesday at 5:28 PM

Most of those things weren't very good before AI was applied.

Translation specifically was pretty bad before Google applied machine learning methods to it around 2007 when it became very good almost overnight.

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zamadatixlast Tuesday at 5:29 PM

Many of these things were "AI" but the marketing hype hadn't gotten there yet. E.g. the local translation in FF is a transformer model, as was Google translate in the cloud since 2018 (and still "AI" looong before that, just not transformer based).

lenerdenatorlast Tuesday at 5:31 PM

Technically, many of those things often were AI.

They just existed before the GenAI craze and no one cared because AI wasn't a buzzword at the time. Google Translate absolutely was based on ML before OpenAI made it a big deal to have things "based on AI".

But just putting stuff in your browser that hooks into third-party services that use ML isn't enough anymore. It has to be front and center otherwise, you're losing the interest of... well, someone. I'm not sure who at this point. I don't care, personally.

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