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A comment on Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI right now. Parent comment

Re:Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI righ... by zirgs on Friday April 07, 2023 @10:24AM (#35481890)
Latvian is a language, that's spoken by less than 2 million people. It's irrelevant outside of Latvia.

All of our government funded researchers who worked on natural language processing can now throw their work in the trash and resign. ChatGPT is leagues better than anything that they've done. And OpenAI weren't even trying.

Windows wasn't even localised in Latvian properly until very recently. Google translate still spits out ridiculous translations. (Though it's better than before). Most software isn't even available in Latvian. Almost no video games are in Latvian. Only the most popular books and movies are being translated. Interested in something less popular - you better learn other languages.

And now ChatGPT comes out and I can ask it to write C++ functions in Latvian. I don't need to learn English to be a programmer any more. Nothing like that has been done before. It translates stuff way better than google. And it will only get better.

Imagine that there's a book that only 50 people from Latvia are interested in. Human translators aren't going to bother. But ChatGPT can do it easily.

This is a very big deal.

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Re:Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI righ... by wrp on Friday April 07, 2023 @11:05AM (#35482311)
Quality machine translation for less common languages would be a service worth paying for. Any links to examples and evaluation of ChatGPT capabilities?
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Re:Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI righ... by og_kalu on Friday April 07, 2023 @06:25PM (#35487838)
https://github.com/ogkalu2/Human-parity-on-machine-translati...
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Re:Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI righ... by jimsimmons on Friday April 07, 2023 @02:40PM (#35485263)
Why is Latvian NLP research in trash?

Real researchers build on advances not quit because of them. I'm sure GPT is not as optimised as it could be to process non-English text. There's clearly a lot of work to do. At least this is true for south asian languages and I'm sure is true even for popular Western languages like French or German

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Re:Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI righ... by yobbo on Friday April 07, 2023 @03:00PM (#35485591)
Most pre-GPT NLP research is obsolete for all languages, but this was understood before ChatGPT.
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Re:Behind the curtain: what it feels like to work in AI righ... by int_19h on Friday April 07, 2023 @02:58PM (#35485566)
This also works in reverse, BTW - think of all the obscure books, movies etc that were never translated because it wasn't worth the effort.
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