4 ms·

This is important work. And think about African or southeast Asian languages, they are even more screwed. We need to make sure that AI multilingual to avoid tot

by v4dok 3y ago

This is important work. And think about African or southeast Asian languages, they are even more screwed. We need to make sure that AI multilingual to avoid total English domination of culture.

benatkin 3y ago
This will be easy, it will go from mostly English to hyperpolyglot quickly.
- ben_w 3y ago
  The issue raised in the article is that there may not be enough training material in many languages to do this. I find this very plausible.
- DoingIsLearning 3y ago
  If it's training on available online corpus then it will go quickly mostly for English and Mandarin. Most countries' classic texts and books are still undigitized sitting in Libraries and public archives. Also book publishing market and online publishing are proportional to total population, smaller country means less content.
tellarin 3y ago
Project Aya is one such attempt at a multi-lingual model (targeting 101 languages): - https://txt.cohere.com/aya-multilingual/ https://txt.cohere.com/aya-multilingual/ - https://aya.for.ai https://aya.for.ai I'm a contributor to the project and all data and model will be open-sourced. We're looking for contributors in many languages!
loxdalen 3y ago
I can speak in my own language with chat gpt without much issue
- rjtavares 3y ago
  While I can speak in Portuguese without much issues (except being hard for them to stick to European Portuguese), I've nooticed that sometimes it uses a clear translation of an English expression that does not feel natural in Portuguese at all.
- asutekku 3y ago
  You can, but it will get facts more likely wrong than if you converse with it in english
mchaver 3y ago
It is a concern because presumably most people in office jobs are going to need to be able to use these tools, but I am somewhat comforted to know one language that AI systems do not understand well yet because of lack of texts. However, I think that will be short lived.
c7DJTLrn 3y ago
>We need to make sure that AI multilingual to avoid total English domination of culture. Not saying English is an ideal language, but I'm interested in why you think it shouldn't dominate. Wouldn't a universal language be a good thing?
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  Not from an aesthetic sense. I think it's really cool that we have a lot of languages. I'm personally willing to pay a high price in inconvenience to keep that coolness around, although not everyone would. However I also don't think we will have to. Machine translation and language learning are substitute goods -- the better the former gets, the fewer people who will feel any desire to pursue the latter, because it just won't be that big of a deal to translate between X and Y anyway. A universal second language for commerce is a fine middle ground, though.
  - snordgren 3y ago
    Given recent developments in AI, building a true Babelfish is more of a hardware challenge than a software challenge these days.
- aziaziazi 3y ago
  Languages are like frameworks, they (slightly) guide your thinking. Think about the same stuff in different languages and you’ll probably get more ideas about it than in one language only.
  - himinlomax 3y ago
    That's the Sapir-Worth hypothesis. It's decidedly pre-Chomsky, and as Pinker calls it, it is both the most well known and accepted linguistic hypothesis and also almost certainly completely wrong.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      It’s something you just know if you’re bilingual or more. It would sound threatening to monolingual speakers but this is just how it works. Languages are our thought construction algorithms. It’s not a “Turing Completeness isn’t real” hypothesis, more like just “Rust != C”. I think this is where software nerd types predict wrong, as it sounds as if it is trying to disprove TC, which shall be futile attempt. It’s not(the former one at least).

by v4dok 3y ago

This is important work. And think about African or southeast Asian languages, they are even more screwed. We need to make sure that AI multilingual to avoid total English domination of culture.

benatkin 3y ago

This will be easy, it will go from mostly English to hyperpolyglot quickly.

ben_w 3y ago
The issue raised in the article is that there may not be enough training material in many languages to do this. I find this very plausible.
DoingIsLearning 3y ago
If it's training on available online corpus then it will go quickly mostly for English and Mandarin. Most countries' classic texts and books are still undigitized sitting in Libraries and public archives. Also book publishing market and online publishing are proportional to total population, smaller country means less content.

tellarin 3y ago

Project Aya is one such attempt at a multi-lingual model (targeting 101 languages): - https://txt.cohere.com/aya-multilingual/ https://txt.cohere.com/aya-multilingual/ - https://aya.for.ai https://aya.for.ai I'm a contributor to the project and all data and model will be open-sourced. We're looking for contributors in many languages!

loxdalen 3y ago

I can speak in my own language with chat gpt without much issue

rjtavares 3y ago
While I can speak in Portuguese without much issues (except being hard for them to stick to European Portuguese), I've nooticed that sometimes it uses a clear translation of an English expression that does not feel natural in Portuguese at all.
asutekku 3y ago
You can, but it will get facts more likely wrong than if you converse with it in english

mchaver 3y ago

It is a concern because presumably most people in office jobs are going to need to be able to use these tools, but I am somewhat comforted to know one language that AI systems do not understand well yet because of lack of texts. However, I think that will be short lived.

c7DJTLrn 3y ago

>We need to make sure that AI multilingual to avoid total English domination of culture. Not saying English is an ideal language, but I'm interested in why you think it shouldn't dominate. Wouldn't a universal language be a good thing?

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Not from an aesthetic sense. I think it's really cool that we have a lot of languages. I'm personally willing to pay a high price in inconvenience to keep that coolness around, although not everyone would. However I also don't think we will have to. Machine translation and language learning are substitute goods -- the better the former gets, the fewer people who will feel any desire to pursue the latter, because it just won't be that big of a deal to translate between X and Y anyway. A universal second language for commerce is a fine middle ground, though.
- snordgren 3y ago
  Given recent developments in AI, building a true Babelfish is more of a hardware challenge than a software challenge these days.
aziaziazi 3y ago
Languages are like frameworks, they (slightly) guide your thinking. Think about the same stuff in different languages and you’ll probably get more ideas about it than in one language only.
- himinlomax 3y ago
  That's the Sapir-Worth hypothesis. It's decidedly pre-Chomsky, and as Pinker calls it, it is both the most well known and accepted linguistic hypothesis and also almost certainly completely wrong.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    It’s something you just know if you’re bilingual or more. It would sound threatening to monolingual speakers but this is just how it works. Languages are our thought construction algorithms. It’s not a “Turing Completeness isn’t real” hypothesis, more like just “Rust != C”. I think this is where software nerd types predict wrong, as it sounds as if it is trying to disprove TC, which shall be futile attempt. It’s not(the former one at least).