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krackers parent
This seems like a terrible comparison since Google Translate is completely beat by DeepL, let alone LLMs. (Google Translate almost surely doesn't use an LLM, or at least not a _large_ one given its speed)
Ninjinka
For Google's Cloud Translation API you can choose between the standard Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model or the "Translation LLM (Google's newest highest quality LLM-style translation model)".

https://cloud.google.com/translate/docs/advanced/translating...

DeepL also has a translation LLM, which they claim is 1.4-1.7x better than their classic model: https://www.deepl.com/en/blog/next-gen-language-model

AndroTux
That’s absolutely not the point of this article. The point was that people said, once Google Translate was introduced, that translators would lose their jobs. Just like people say the same thing about developers with LLMs nowadays. The point is: they didn’t, and they won’t.

DeepL is not part of that point. Yes, maybe eventually, developers will lose their jobs to something that is an evolution of LLMs. But that’s not relevant here.

resoluteteeth
> The point was that people said, once Google Translate was introduced, that translators would lose their jobs. Just like people say the same thing about developers with LLMs nowadays. The point is: they didn’t, and they won’t.

Translators are losing their jobs now though. Google translate wasn't very good for Japanese so a lot of people assumed that machine translation would never be a threat, but deepl was better to the point where a lot of translation moved to just cleaning up it's output and current state of the art llms as of the last six months are much better and can also be given context and other instructions to reduce the need for humans to clean up the output. When the dust settles translation as a job is probably going to be dead.

tiagod
I highly doubt LLMs will do a good job translating literature anytime soon.
resoluteteeth
Ok but that that's probably 0.1% of all translation work.

It's the equivalent of llms eliminating everything except a handful of system architect jobs at FAANG companies in terms of programming.

ethan_smith
Google Translate has actually been using neural machine translation since 2016 and integrated PaLM 2 (a large language model) in 2023 for over 100 languages, though DeepL does still outperform it in many benchmarks.

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