alt Hacker NewsThat’s some grade A nonsense.
The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation, the task which arguably these chatbots are the most suited! It’s the task that they’re far the best at, both relative to older translation algorithms (which were also AI), and relative to their capabilities other tasks that they’re being put to. These LLMs are “just” text-to-text transformers! That’s where the name comes from!
“Stop using the best electric power tool, please use the outdated steam powered tool.” is what you’re saying right now.
You’re not even asking for something to be “hand crafted”, you’re just being a luddite.
Replies
> The core algorithm behind modern generative AI was developed specifically for translation
Indeed! And yet, generative AI systems wire it up as a lossy compression / predictive text model, which discreetly confabulates what it doesn't understand. Why not use a transformer-based model architecture actually designed for translation? I'd much rather the model take a best-guess (which might be useful, or might be nonsense, but will at least be conspicuous nonsense) than substitute a different (less-obviously nonsense) meaning entirely.
Bonus: purpose-built translation models are much smaller, can tractably be run on a CPU, and (since they require less data) can be built from corpora whose authors consented to this use. There's no compelling reason to throw an LLM at the problem, introducing multiple ethical issues and generally pissing off your audience, for a worse result.
Heh, it's amazing how people have already forgotten exactly how terrible older ML translation was.