I'm not sure this is all that soon. The first paper using RNNs in an encoder-decoder framework from Hinton et al which blew the top off of phrase-based systems'

I'm not sure this is all that soon. The first paper using RNNs in an encoder-decoder framework from Hinton et al which blew the top off of phrase-based systems' BLEU scores was back in... 2013? It's been a long time. And it's been an especially frustrating wait because whenever you mention how deep systems have made huge process on translation, someone will be sure to note that Google Translate produces total gibberish for Japanese-English and in general is pretty bad, and then you had to explain that as far as anyone knows, Google may be publishing papers on how RNNs translate great but that doesn't mean they've rolled them out to the public Google Translate yet, which looks like making excuses. Now we get to see a productized version of the RNNs out in the wild.