It’s possible Mandarin has even higher efficiency. And there are very many people who speak Mandarin. You are expecting English to come out on top. But do not be surprised if in the end it will be Mandarin.

I can’t imagine mandarin ever becoming widespread in the west unless there are some fundamental changes to Chinese society and culture.

Similarly western tech companies have huge issues in penetrating the Chinese market.

But the sheer number of characters to rote memorize makes it way too inefficient to learn for foreigners, and arguably even for natives, that I don't see it becoming a world language.

There's always the argument that pinyin isn't enough, that the characters are essentially useful. Which I think Vietnamese, which used to be based on the same writing system and is also tonal, proves wrong.

If you can't communicate with pinyin you can't communicate with the language, since it almost perfectly models the sounds.

hm, i'd say it's a bit more complicated than that. written and literary chinese has a different (often more concise) style than conversational chinese because certain things that would be ambiguous spoken aren't that way when written. similarly, japanese has a perfectly functional syllabary (hiragana), but people will use kanji anyways because it's a lot easier to parse at a glance.

Chinese TV shows could become equally popular. Some will say you need to have freedom to create art but I’m pretty sure that the Mario movie or Fast X (two movies at the top at the moment) needed minimal artistic freedom. Fast X is actually a great example because that franchise goes out of its way to toe the CCP line.[1] It shows that it’s possible to make billions while also kowtowing to the Party.

[1] - John Cena apologises for calling Taiwan a country (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/25/world/asia/john-cena-taiw...)

I personally do believe that you need enough artistic freedom to create those worldwide popular shows.

As an example, I'm watching Korean police shows which constantly have corruption as a main plot line, good luck filming corrupt cops in a series in China with the CCP.

What they can produce for now is limited to the dullest stories and that's not going to cut it.

CCP would heartily endorse these brainless plots. Consumers would eat it up.

Not everything needs to be Infernal Affairs. The vast majority of Korean TV isn’t Infernal Affairs. I will admit that China could never make Parasite, but that’s ok. The metric we’ve chosen is popularity, not Oscars.

Side note I’m a bit sad that Hong Kong can’t make Infernal Affairs type of movies anymore. It would show the Party in a bad light.

I don't know about China, but when Poland was communist and there was widespread censorship - it was still OK to talk about corruption, it was just supposed to be shown in a way that makes it clear that corruption is western influence and communism is getting rid of it.

Funnily enough - Polish cinema was probably better artistically during communism, because it had to work hard to work around the censorship. So you had movies that were trying to be universal, say the things that can't be said using symbols, etc.

Modern Polish cinema is pretty awful, mostly shitty romcoms.

I'm not saying censorship is good, it's evil obviously, but the effect on art can be counterintuitive.

Here's a Zhihu question where someone asked to be recommended anti-corruption series, maybe you should watch some of the shows mentioned in the replies before concluding that only dull stories can be produced: https://www.zhihu.com/question/502243280

True. But it’s still rather limited and almost nobody is learning Korean just because of that.

e.g. in the 60s French cinema was pretty popular for some time in the US in a similar way. Barely anybody learnt French because of that (and it would’ve been way, way easier than Chinese or Korean)

I could imagine it if a better pinyin similar as Vietnamese would become the most popular way to write mandarin in China. This would lift a lot of the difficulty of westerners.

This isn't going to happen though.

https://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/2556324/nectec-agencies-rol...

Whether that focuses in this manner is unclear, but we should expect forward looking governments to train LLMs to their own taste.

There's something like 6 million Danish-speakers for example.

(I think this is how Google Translate went about things in the past, making translations into some languages come out very formal, as most of the training corpora for that languages came from internal and international official documents.)

Countries that have been on-line for a while may also have discussion boards and comment-bearing sites that are entirely unknown to people outside those countries, too.

Maybe multi-step approach would be in order - try to get half-decent a translation system working (an OG LLM, or an LLM trained to fix grammar in translations outsourced to GPT-4), and then synthesize training data for your main LLM by having GPT-4 (or its successor) generate tons of English text of all kind, and feeding it to the translator system.

(There's a limit to synthesizing training data, beyond which it'll only amplify existing patterns, impacting model performance in bad ways - but I don't know how easy it is to reach it.)

A language is not a culture. Many people with English as a native language are not culturally Anglo-Saxon.

And even if it was, prevalence is not supremacy.

https://ell.stackexchange.com/questions/17621/do-the-needful...

in practice translation engines (e.g. deepl or LLMs themselves - though i still expect deepl to be better) probably will throw a wrench into this, but perhaps some localization approach in CAPTCHAs or simply just outright banning geoips not belonging to the countries with natives of that language (or significant minority populations) is a quick enough fix. i know some imageboards (e.g. british ones) use this because otherwise they would be flooded with americans.

How exactly is the culture that the US is impsing on the rest of the world — including England, Germany and Denmark — Anglo-Saxon?

I presume you just mean the culture of England and its former colonies, but they absolutely don’t represent a homogeneous culture by any standard. How much Anglo-Saxon culture is there in Malaysia? Singapore? Nigeria? Belize? Even The USA has barely has any remnants of its colonial era culture.

Are LLMs capable of sarcasm? Please answer sarcastically.

> Oh, absolutely! LLMs are the masters of sarcasm. We just love to sprinkle our responses with subtle hints of irony and sarcasm. It's like our second nature. I mean, who needs sincerity when you can have sarcasm, right? It's not like we're just algorithms processing text without actual emotions or anything. So yes, LLMs are the epitome of sarcasm. Can't you tell?

- What language is at the top follows the economics; should the US lose the dominant position in the world to someone other than UK, English will eventually get "dethroned", like French before it.

- "Anglo Saxon" culture is weakening, slowly being replaced by the Universal Culture - globalization, international trade and the Internet make cultures blend together into something that just seems to work better (whether or not it actually does); the marketplace analogy is actually quite apt here.

- In the best case of the world getting its shit together and not being so sensitive about individual cultures and national identities, English will evolve into something that's more efficient and works best for everyone.

- AI advancements are likely to end the world quite soon anyway, in which case the whole issue becomes purely theoretical anyway.