Hacker News Reader

Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

I mean, Google Translate has been basically completely AI powered for 5+ years, and it's one of the most used products in the world...

The majority of what you see on SERPs has been AI generated for a decade, and that's Google's main money maker.

This idea that Google sucks at AI and is clearly a million miles behind is intriguing.

Google is currently the company everyone loves to hate like MSFT was 5-10 years ago.

THAT is a bad sign regardless if anything the people are saying has any truth to it.

MSFT has been the king of enterprise software since the 80s. But around 2000, everyone and their mother was talking about how MSFT can't produce any software beside complete garbage.

None of that was true. But, MSFT was in for some relatively bad times for a decade or so.

I suspect the same thing is going to happen to Google just because sentiment is powerful.

View on HN

You now that, I know that, everyone knows that. And yet, google stresses it everytime, like the company is anxious that people is looking for OpenAI and not google.

Some of the key people behind translate founded OpenAI. Don’t forget it’s always been about the people, not the brand.

Google was good at attracting and retaining the best and brightest. Now they aren’t.

Citation needed?

Ask and ye shall receive:

“Based in part on his work with Hinton, Sutskever was hired by Google. There, he implemented a neural-network-driven approach to language translation that produced fewer errors than competing efforts. His work provided the basis for a major upgrade to Google Translate. “Researchers didn’t believe that neural networks could do translation, so it was a big surprise when they could,” he says.”

https://magazine.utoronto.ca/people/alumni-donors/heard-it-t...

Hinton left last week as well.

Google could also integrate their translation service into their consumer AR product that's coming out in 2024 to do live translations, directions, and other real-time image "AI" analysis stuff. A ChatGPT type assistant built into your day-to-day life could be interesting. If not for Q&A other use cases we don't yet know about.

https://www.techradar.com/features/google-glass-2-everything...

Apple is apparently announcing their AR glasses in June

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-04-02/when-i...

>and it's one of the most used products in the world...

And they had their lunch completely eaten by deepL

Did they? I've never heard of deepL, and Google Translate still has close to 1 billion users.

In terms of wider userbase Google Translate is still de facto, but anyone who uses MTL heavily knows that DeepL beats Google Translate for most languages, especially east asian ones.

Sure - and Ubuntu is better than Windows. In business, it doesn't really matter.

> I mean, Google Translate has been basically completely AI powered for 5+ years, and it's one of the most used products in the world...

It's also the single clearest example of a product that's been left behind by the "AI revolution" - while Google may still have the numbers (like Yahoo Search did back in the day), DeepL is what serious people use.

> The majority of what you see on SERPs has been AI generated for a decade, and that's Google's main money maker.

It's also got subjectively worse and worse over that same time period. Demand for a better search engine is higher than it's been for decades.

And DeepL translate is blown out of the water by Chat GPT 4.

I tested GPT 3.5, GPT 4.0, Google Translate, and DeepL on some "difficult" sentences, and GPT 4 was the only one that could translate them correctly. Not only that, it could do style shifts in non-English languages, such as "make this more formal", "less formal", "idiomatic", etc...

I suspect that GPT 4 is so good at translation is because it understands what it is translating at a near-human level.

I like this snippet:

"John Bear from Bear Stearns was bearish about bear pelt futures on the Bear City bear markets."

Which GPT 4 can round-trip from English -> Hungarian -> Chinese -> English again and outputs this:

"John Bell comes from Bellsterns and has a very strong bearish sentiment on the future value of bear skins in the Bear City bear market."

Interesting to note that it used a sounds-alike-to-Chinese-speakers "Bell" for "Bear" in proper names. Other than that, this is pretty good, which is very impressive. DeepL and Google Translate shreds the first step and have no hope on a round-trip this long across such unrelated languages. For example, DeepL outputs some gibberish about bear claws (the pastry) and bear cubs!?

> But around 2000, everyone and their mother was talking about how MSFT can't produce any software beside complete garbage. > None of that was true.

Ummm… In 2000s MSFT was producing complete garbage. Internet Explorer, Windows XP then ME, Windows Phone, ASP, Bing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com