4 ms·

> What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. Translation between languages. That value dwarfs all programm

> What I don't see is vast areas of industry finding $10s to $100s of billions of value in LLMs. Translation between languages. That value dwarfs all programming value that can be had. Economically, culturally, scientifically, spiritually.

eikenberry 2mo ago
But translations don't require anything close to SOTA level models. Translations will be high volume, low margin transactions. That will not save Anthropic.
- carlosjobim 2mo ago
  Maybe not Anthropic, but LLM translations has a value counted in the trillions of dollars easily.
  - tock 2mo ago
    I see it's important but trillions? How did you quantify that number?
    - carlosjobim 2mo ago
      Tourism and travel is 10% of global GDP, or about 10 trillion dollars. And it's not the only sector where translation between languages is a benefit. However, I am not sure that the trillions of dollars of value from LLM translation in the coming few years will translate into trillions of dollars of income for the AI companies.
      - tock 2mo ago
        Yep translation is going to be a free feature on all devices using on-device LLMs. I see no revenue flowing to AI companies.
        carlosjobim 2mo ago
        Commercial grade translation between dozens of languages would take enormous amounts of disk space. But we'll see. Text editing tools are included on all digital devices, yet companies pay for commercial solutions like MS Office. Cameras and basic image editing tools are included on all smart phones, yet there are millions of advertising agencies around the world. And so on.
        tock 2mo ago
        LLM frontier companies are more akin to infrastructure like chips and airplanes and the internet than applications built on top of it. There will be products built on top of them that generate revenue. eg. processors are needed for everything on the planet. No Intel isn't going to generate annual revenue in the trillions because of that. In the case of frontier companies the moat is even smaller with dozens of players competing. LLMs will become a low-cost commodity. You meanwhile can make billions building applications using them though.
        carlosjobim 2mo ago
        > eg. processors are needed for everything on the planet. No Intel isn't going to generate annual revenue in the trillions because of that. No, but Intel processors are going to generate revenue in the trillions for the economy, which was the original question as far as I understood it.
nitwit005 2mo ago
Between human languages? The problem will be Google is giving that away for free.
- carlosjobim 2mo ago
  The quality of Google Translate is so low that it isn't even in the picture.
- theshrike79 2mo ago
  You can do that with single words or phrases. Now do a full movie's subtitles with google translate, in an automated fashion. So that it understands the context and still translates it correctly.
bluegatty 2mo ago
Social issues aside, that's a tiny slice of the economics of AI. Just by nature of how often it's used etc. You need workloads for AI be cost effective: software, automation etc.
- carlosjobim 2mo ago
  International trade is a giant sector already, and potentially much bigger than that, now that LLM assisted translation makes it easy to offer your products and services in any language, or make complicated and sensitive deals without a common language. Hackers always rage and down vote every time I mention this, because they are unable to see beyond their small world. Why didn't they learn that their part of the internet is 0,000000001% of what the world uses the internet for today. It's going to be the same with LLMs. Programming and hacker stuff is going to be 0,0000000000000000000000000000001% of what the world uses AI for. But translation is going to be in the top 5 of use cases.
  - fullshark 2mo ago
    I think OP's comment is about volume/scale more so than practical application.
  - thinking_cactus 2mo ago
    I think quite cheap models will probably work with translation (I think for many use cases Google's now fairly old tech works well enough and is free?). The main problem is I think you're assuming because the current translation market is large (I'm just going to assume it's ~100B in size just from a cursory search), then it will remain large with LLMs. If LLMs are much cheaper than humans, even with a lot of growth in translation volume the total spend may not compensate for it (again most of the volume will probably be using almost free models?). Another is assuming that because something is valuable you can charge a lot for it. Like, oxygen from air is extremely valuable to us. If oxygen somehow depleted we would die almost instantly. It does not mean everyone goes around purchasing oxygen or even less that you can charge absurd amounts for it.
    - 2mo ago
nisiddharth 2mo ago
A model bundled in your phone can do the translation, you're thinking too much of it.
- carlosjobim 2mo ago
  A model bundled in your phone cannot do commercial grade quality of translations.

eikenberry 2mo ago

But translations don't require anything close to SOTA level models. Translations will be high volume, low margin transactions. That will not save Anthropic.

carlosjobim 2mo ago
Maybe not Anthropic, but LLM translations has a value counted in the trillions of dollars easily.
- tock 2mo ago
  I see it's important but trillions? How did you quantify that number?
  - carlosjobim 2mo ago
    Tourism and travel is 10% of global GDP, or about 10 trillion dollars. And it's not the only sector where translation between languages is a benefit. However, I am not sure that the trillions of dollars of value from LLM translation in the coming few years will translate into trillions of dollars of income for the AI companies.
    - tock 2mo ago
      Yep translation is going to be a free feature on all devices using on-device LLMs. I see no revenue flowing to AI companies.
      - carlosjobim 2mo ago
        Commercial grade translation between dozens of languages would take enormous amounts of disk space. But we'll see. Text editing tools are included on all digital devices, yet companies pay for commercial solutions like MS Office. Cameras and basic image editing tools are included on all smart phones, yet there are millions of advertising agencies around the world. And so on.
        tock 2mo ago
        LLM frontier companies are more akin to infrastructure like chips and airplanes and the internet than applications built on top of it. There will be products built on top of them that generate revenue. eg. processors are needed for everything on the planet. No Intel isn't going to generate annual revenue in the trillions because of that. In the case of frontier companies the moat is even smaller with dozens of players competing. LLMs will become a low-cost commodity. You meanwhile can make billions building applications using them though.
        carlosjobim 2mo ago
        > eg. processors are needed for everything on the planet. No Intel isn't going to generate annual revenue in the trillions because of that. No, but Intel processors are going to generate revenue in the trillions for the economy, which was the original question as far as I understood it.

nitwit005 2mo ago

Between human languages? The problem will be Google is giving that away for free.

carlosjobim 2mo ago
The quality of Google Translate is so low that it isn't even in the picture.
theshrike79 2mo ago
You can do that with single words or phrases. Now do a full movie's subtitles with google translate, in an automated fashion. So that it understands the context and still translates it correctly.

bluegatty 2mo ago

Social issues aside, that's a tiny slice of the economics of AI. Just by nature of how often it's used etc. You need workloads for AI be cost effective: software, automation etc.

carlosjobim 2mo ago
International trade is a giant sector already, and potentially much bigger than that, now that LLM assisted translation makes it easy to offer your products and services in any language, or make complicated and sensitive deals without a common language. Hackers always rage and down vote every time I mention this, because they are unable to see beyond their small world. Why didn't they learn that their part of the internet is 0,000000001% of what the world uses the internet for today. It's going to be the same with LLMs. Programming and hacker stuff is going to be 0,0000000000000000000000000000001% of what the world uses AI for. But translation is going to be in the top 5 of use cases.
- fullshark 2mo ago
  I think OP's comment is about volume/scale more so than practical application.
- thinking_cactus 2mo ago
  I think quite cheap models will probably work with translation (I think for many use cases Google's now fairly old tech works well enough and is free?). The main problem is I think you're assuming because the current translation market is large (I'm just going to assume it's ~100B in size just from a cursory search), then it will remain large with LLMs. If LLMs are much cheaper than humans, even with a lot of growth in translation volume the total spend may not compensate for it (again most of the volume will probably be using almost free models?). Another is assuming that because something is valuable you can charge a lot for it. Like, oxygen from air is extremely valuable to us. If oxygen somehow depleted we would die almost instantly. It does not mean everyone goes around purchasing oxygen or even less that you can charge absurd amounts for it.
  - 2mo ago

nisiddharth 2mo ago

A model bundled in your phone can do the translation, you're thinking too much of it.

carlosjobim 2mo ago
A model bundled in your phone cannot do commercial grade quality of translations.