Hacker News Reader

Their translation service is based on llms and is commercially a successful product.

Transformer models rather than LLMs surely. ChatGPT behaves nothing like Google Translate.

The T in ChatGPT stands for Transformers. The similarity between the OG Transformer from 2017 and GPT3 (and other modern LLMs) is pretty big

The data, size and training process are what's different.

The point is LLMs are built with Transformer architecture. They're all transformers, attention is an integral part of building worthwhile, contextual answers.

Yeah, but LLMs are more specific, so it's a subset.

Also, LLMs use "in-context learning" ie you actually ask it "hey, translate this" and then it has a conversation with you where you can ask to clarify or provide word definitions.

Google Translate is more hardcoded; a big problem with it is that it can't explain any of the decisions it's made or show its uncertainty about anything.

Of course, neither of these are reliable since they hallucinate.

I favor ChatGPT over Google Translate now. ChatGPT has the added benefit it is focused on providing helpful answers, so if it comes across something almost untranslatable, it will be able to address that and provide an explanation in the style of a footpage note.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com