alt Hacker NewsAbstract wikipedia is taking a symbolic AI approach instead of an LLM or other statistical approach. The hope is (as i understand it) that this will provide reliability, predictability and better extend to languages that don't have a large corpus of text to train things on.
Personally i think its a bit of a wild bet, that seems especially surprising in the modern context. Guess we'll have to see if it pans out.
I'd kind of expect that they do better with translation if one of the languages on either end is English due to the amount of input they get in it compared to this abstract language (even in the world of human translation, translating stuff into English as a "pivot language" and then doing every translation from the English translation rather than the original text is not an uncommon practice).