[ogrisel]

I assume that Google Translate has a much larger usage volume than any of the free-to-use LLMs.

I don't know the average energy/hardware*time usage per query on google translate vs competing LLMs such as Claude 3 Opus but I wouldn't be surprised that a large LLM such as Claude 3 Opus would be much too expensive to be used as the backend model for a free service like Google Translate.

The paper authors do acknowledge this concern and run experiments on smaller models with knowledge distillation. However, as far as I know we cannot know if their distilled networks can compete with the current Google Translate system in terms of energy / hardware usage efficiency.