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This has been already solved even without LLMs for years: Google Translate, DeepL and Firefox Translate have done this use-case already, much more efficiently t

This has been already solved even without LLMs for years: Google Translate, DeepL and Firefox Translate have done this use-case already, much more efficiently than LLMs. So what does this particular use case of a transformer as a general-purpose computer solve that hasn't already been solved before? Why do we need this?

lolinder 3y ago
> Google Translate, DeepL and Firefox Translate have done this use-case already, much more efficiently than LLMs. They may have been more efficient, but the transformer-based Google Translate we have today is way better at its job than its predecessors, and the old Google Translate wasn't capable of other NLU tasks that can now all be done by transformers (and again, all better than the previous specialized tools). I agree that transformer-as-Turing-machine isn't really solving any problems, but transformers have been nothing short of revolutionary for tasks that have usually been hard for plain Turing computation.