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Nevertheless, the huge jump is from "does not work at all" to "it works". It seems likely that the technology that worked for English will also work for many ot

Nevertheless, the huge jump is from "does not work at all" to "it works". It seems likely that the technology that worked for English will also work for many other languages. As for Chinese, it is also pretty amazing that you can visit a Chinese website, click "translate" in your browser's menu bar, and get a reasonably readable translated version. I wonder if people just take too many things for granted. Or internet search - they say quality of Google searches have been declining, nevertheless we had a pretty good run for the past 20 years or so with being able to find information on the internet. That is AI as well.

alpaca128 5y ago
> It seems likely that the technology that worked for English will also work for many other languages. It won't for the foreseeable future. Not for technical reasons; it's just that other languages are usually not handled correctly because most companies think they can just use the exact same approach as in English and they're done. Until they realise that non-English native speakers also use English words and abbreviations to some degree, both in IT-related contexts but also in everyday life. Now it doesn't just need to handle that one language but also English with an accent. If they're lucky it'll work reasonably well in most cases despite variations depending on the region. Right now even keyboard completion suggestions struggle with mixing languages and become completely useless in some cases. As English words may be mixed in at any location (and in wildly different frequencies depending on the user) the software now has to guess the language for every single word. The results are not great. > they say quality of Google searches have been declining, nevertheless we had a pretty good run for the past 20 years or so As long as Google continues with blunders like showing wrong pictures of people in infoboxes they'll keep failing hard. Their amazing AI shows wrong pictures for serial killers, rape victims and more, which already led to consequences for those people. What makes it much worse is that when someone complains about such a case Google will just replace that picture with another wrong portrait - if they react at all. It would be helpful if those big tech companies would for once trust in human intelligence instead of throwing larger models at the problem.
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  Maybe people using Google should start to apply some common sense and not believe everything at face value. Nevertheless, the examples you cite are extremes that affect only few people. So you would rather have no internet search engines at all, so that those problems could be avoided? Isn't that a bit like saying cars are crap because people die in accidents? Maybe there are just upsides and downsides to most new technologies, and if the upsides outweigh the downsides by far, people will go for it? As for human intelligence, I am not convinced humans would necessarily fare better at such tasks. I mean they fall for the "same name, same person" fallacy.
  - thedevelopnik 5y ago
    “Google should not use badly trained beta ML to guess which person in the world with this name is a serial killer” is not “there should be no search engines.” Google was very successful with the latter for a long time before they started in on the former.
    - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
      So they went overboard with that feature. But I really doubt humans would do much better. I think if they encounter somebody with the name of a known serial killer, most people would at least pause.

alpaca128 5y ago

> It seems likely that the technology that worked for English will also work for many other languages. It won't for the foreseeable future. Not for technical reasons; it's just that other languages are usually not handled correctly because most companies think they can just use the exact same approach as in English and they're done. Until they realise that non-English native speakers also use English words and abbreviations to some degree, both in IT-related contexts but also in everyday life. Now it doesn't just need to handle that one language but also English with an accent. If they're lucky it'll work reasonably well in most cases despite variations depending on the region. Right now even keyboard completion suggestions struggle with mixing languages and become completely useless in some cases. As English words may be mixed in at any location (and in wildly different frequencies depending on the user) the software now has to guess the language for every single word. The results are not great. > they say quality of Google searches have been declining, nevertheless we had a pretty good run for the past 20 years or so As long as Google continues with blunders like showing wrong pictures of people in infoboxes they'll keep failing hard. Their amazing AI shows wrong pictures for serial killers, rape victims and more, which already led to consequences for those people. What makes it much worse is that when someone complains about such a case Google will just replace that picture with another wrong portrait - if they react at all. It would be helpful if those big tech companies would for once trust in human intelligence instead of throwing larger models at the problem.

notanzaiiswear 5y ago
Maybe people using Google should start to apply some common sense and not believe everything at face value. Nevertheless, the examples you cite are extremes that affect only few people. So you would rather have no internet search engines at all, so that those problems could be avoided? Isn't that a bit like saying cars are crap because people die in accidents? Maybe there are just upsides and downsides to most new technologies, and if the upsides outweigh the downsides by far, people will go for it? As for human intelligence, I am not convinced humans would necessarily fare better at such tasks. I mean they fall for the "same name, same person" fallacy.
- thedevelopnik 5y ago
  “Google should not use badly trained beta ML to guess which person in the world with this name is a serial killer” is not “there should be no search engines.” Google was very successful with the latter for a long time before they started in on the former.
  - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    So they went overboard with that feature. But I really doubt humans would do much better. I think if they encounter somebody with the name of a known serial killer, most people would at least pause.