3 ms·

This claim seems a bit exaggerated. Microsoft Research Asia, as one example, has been doing neural machine translation for a large number of languages without r

This claim seems a bit exaggerated. Microsoft Research Asia, as one example, has been doing neural machine translation for a large number of languages without relying in English for quite some time; and models are used in production scenarios too.

bredren 6y ago
When I was doing my MBA about a decade ago, I teamed up with two other grad students to propose, raise money and ultimately install a demonstration / residential size wind turbine on campus. It was part of our work positioning entrepreneurship around clean energy. We worked with the college press office to draft our press release, and in it we made the claim that it was the first wind turbine on a school campus in the greater Boston area. Well one of the bigger papers picked up the story and the press office ended up getting a nasty voicemail from some parent at a private high school in some Boston suburb. The parent wanted our school to know that HIS kid's school was the first to put up a wind turbine. This actually worried our little team because we didn't want to say something untrue. But the pr person explained that this "first to do X" type of thing is a very common press tactic and it is not unusual to have your claim disputed. And that second, "greater Boston area" is not really a narrowly defined term. This was something of a relief and we sort of had a running gag about the PTA dad with sour grapes about our wind turbine from then on.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Ma8ee 6y ago
  It reminds me of a church which claim to fame is being the second largest wooden church in the middle part of northern Sweden.
- aquadrop 6y ago
  Sorry, but what your PR office's response looks like is just a more elaborate way of saying "Don't worry, we lie all the time"
  - sammorrowdrums 6y ago
    The clue is in the name Public Relations. If "massaging" the truth to make it appear better than it is, and changing focus from the real problematic things to positive things isn't the job I don't know what is. You can call it hyperbole and good marketing, but then it also goes to the extent of PR after oil spills, tailings damns wiping out villages and poisoning or risking the health of your own workforce, like for example Dupont and C8. It's hard not to be cynical about PR because you cannot do it effectively without creating / propagating a distorted view of the truth. But then again, the reason it still essentially needs to exist is because there is no universal truth, no universal sense of good or bad. So for example, do I forgive nuclear power and GM food companies from trying to influence public discourse on the safety of their work? Of course, it's essential in a world where they are competing against lots of unwarranted negative attention, much of it baseless as far as the science goes. Anyway in spite of my ranting and bias, really I'd conclude it's a necessary evil, and the majority of the industry is innocuous and just trying to showcase the work and values of their clients... Also newspaper editors are a huge part to blame, when these days loads of press releases make it to print almost unedited (and as has happened to myself and others I know, the bits they changed were even more wrong - including in national level newspaper)... Fact checking claims and sources is so lacking, especially in fast modern news cycle. [edit] typo
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      > But then again, the reason it still essentially needs to exist is because there is no universal truth, no universal sense of good or bad. That may be true to some extent if you really push the philosophy angle, but I'd say real world is much simpler than that. There's stuff that happened, and there are consequences - just because the consequences may not be fully computable in the amount of time and effort anyone is willing to expend on it, doesn't mean truth suddenly becomes fuzzy. The territory is sharp, it's just the map that's uncertain. But for that, the proper words are "I'm not sure", not "I have my truth, you have yours". > So for example, do I forgive nuclear power and GM food companies from trying to influence public discourse on the safety of their work? Of course, it's essential in a world where they are competing against lots of unwarranted negative attention, much of it baseless as far as the science goes. And because of what I wrote above, I despise both. Yes, I understand the practical necessity - one side lies because the other side lies too, both stuck in a feedback loop. But I'd still say both are behaving unethically. Two wrongs don't make a right. I subscribe to the viewpoint I've best seen phrased in an old blog post[0]: "promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires". -- [0] - http://web.archive.org/web/20080915221100/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=124 http://web.archive.org/web/20080915221100/http://www.acceler...
schrep 6y ago
Do you have a reference/citation for any system that does 100x100 translation? That's the claim here - first to do 100x00 language directions from a single model. But if we are wrong I'd happily update with a reference/citation.

bredren 6y ago

When I was doing my MBA about a decade ago, I teamed up with two other grad students to propose, raise money and ultimately install a demonstration / residential size wind turbine on campus. It was part of our work positioning entrepreneurship around clean energy. We worked with the college press office to draft our press release, and in it we made the claim that it was the first wind turbine on a school campus in the greater Boston area. Well one of the bigger papers picked up the story and the press office ended up getting a nasty voicemail from some parent at a private high school in some Boston suburb. The parent wanted our school to know that HIS kid's school was the first to put up a wind turbine. This actually worried our little team because we didn't want to say something untrue. But the pr person explained that this "first to do X" type of thing is a very common press tactic and it is not unusual to have your claim disputed. And that second, "greater Boston area" is not really a narrowly defined term. This was something of a relief and we sort of had a running gag about the PTA dad with sour grapes about our wind turbine from then on.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ma8ee 6y ago
It reminds me of a church which claim to fame is being the second largest wooden church in the middle part of northern Sweden.
aquadrop 6y ago
Sorry, but what your PR office's response looks like is just a more elaborate way of saying "Don't worry, we lie all the time"
- sammorrowdrums 6y ago
  The clue is in the name Public Relations. If "massaging" the truth to make it appear better than it is, and changing focus from the real problematic things to positive things isn't the job I don't know what is. You can call it hyperbole and good marketing, but then it also goes to the extent of PR after oil spills, tailings damns wiping out villages and poisoning or risking the health of your own workforce, like for example Dupont and C8. It's hard not to be cynical about PR because you cannot do it effectively without creating / propagating a distorted view of the truth. But then again, the reason it still essentially needs to exist is because there is no universal truth, no universal sense of good or bad. So for example, do I forgive nuclear power and GM food companies from trying to influence public discourse on the safety of their work? Of course, it's essential in a world where they are competing against lots of unwarranted negative attention, much of it baseless as far as the science goes. Anyway in spite of my ranting and bias, really I'd conclude it's a necessary evil, and the majority of the industry is innocuous and just trying to showcase the work and values of their clients... Also newspaper editors are a huge part to blame, when these days loads of press releases make it to print almost unedited (and as has happened to myself and others I know, the bits they changed were even more wrong - including in national level newspaper)... Fact checking claims and sources is so lacking, especially in fast modern news cycle. [edit] typo
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    > But then again, the reason it still essentially needs to exist is because there is no universal truth, no universal sense of good or bad. That may be true to some extent if you really push the philosophy angle, but I'd say real world is much simpler than that. There's stuff that happened, and there are consequences - just because the consequences may not be fully computable in the amount of time and effort anyone is willing to expend on it, doesn't mean truth suddenly becomes fuzzy. The territory is sharp, it's just the map that's uncertain. But for that, the proper words are "I'm not sure", not "I have my truth, you have yours". > So for example, do I forgive nuclear power and GM food companies from trying to influence public discourse on the safety of their work? Of course, it's essential in a world where they are competing against lots of unwarranted negative attention, much of it baseless as far as the science goes. And because of what I wrote above, I despise both. Yes, I understand the practical necessity - one side lies because the other side lies too, both stuck in a feedback loop. But I'd still say both are behaving unethically. Two wrongs don't make a right. I subscribe to the viewpoint I've best seen phrased in an old blog post[0]: "promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don’t do it to anyone unless you’d also slash their tires". -- [0] - http://web.archive.org/web/20080915221100/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=124 http://web.archive.org/web/20080915221100/http://www.acceler...

schrep 6y ago

Do you have a reference/citation for any system that does 100x100 translation? That's the claim here - first to do 100x00 language directions from a single model. But if we are wrong I'd happily update with a reference/citation.