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by CorrectHorseBat 111 days ago
It's not all bad is it? On device translation of websites for example is much better than the alternatives.
3 comments

Until very recently, on device translation was not marketed as AI.
Yet translation was the main application for applied language machine learning.
When would've thought that to solve natural language translation, one would first need to solve... natural language.

All those arguments about agents and hallucinations kind of distracted people from noticing we've accodentally built a universal translator.

It's been at least 10 years that google translate had hallucinations. Some translation simply change depending of a ponctuation mark. But peoples complain only now that they heard about AI.

Of course it's not perfect, but I agree that we didn't had a machine translation as good before.

As someone both exposed to this new wave of LLM style translation in various media, and someone who has background in translation, no we didn't.
Could you please explain briefly then why my statement is wrong? What are the fundamental challenges not addressed by LLMs today? Do you think the whole approach has insurmountable roadblocks ahead, or is it more of a matter of refinement?
Context dependant phrases, from simple pronouns to whole domain specific terms, are still randomly wrong, sometimes appallingly so. Hallucinations still happen. Auto-AI translation youtube uses is, bluntly, horrid. Any jokes, even obvious ones, are still fumbled frequently.

LLM based translation looks more convincing but requires the same level of scrutiny that previous tools did. From a workflow POV they only added higher compute costs for very questionable gains.

On device or not, it's a transformer model, so some view it as tainted.
I don’t want nor need on device translation enabled by default. I’ve gone without it for the three decades in which browsers have been around. I’m sure it’s brilliantly useful for some people. A one time ‘would you like to enable AI on startup’ for at least years with user profiles that are significantly old would at least be a show of good faith.
It literally breaks YouTube