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Comment by bastardoperator | Hacker News Reader

All those things we had before AI?

Most of those things weren't very good before AI was applied.

Translation specifically was pretty bad before Google applied machine learning methods to it around 2007 when it became very good almost overnight.

Google Translation never "became very good" and it still isn't when you compare it to DeepL or Kagi.

Where it excels is quantity. Often, niche languages are only available on Google Translate.

Google Translate became very good compared to what came before it. Other stuff is better now and one day we will say the tools of today are trash.

No, even when they switched to machine learning their translations still made mistakes that would have made you look goofy. And even today their models still make mistakes that are just weird.

It is especially baffling because Google has much better data sets and much more compute than their competitors.

Google Translate isn't what's meant when tech CEOs say "AI" in 2025.

What tech CEO says is "a text box with magic" Google translate fulfills that and there are ways to integrate with LLM if technology marketing is important.

Unless it is nVidia's CEO, who wants to sell specific hardware, they mostly care about the buzz of the term, not a specific technology, though.

Stop blurring the lines, google translate using machine learning has nothing to do with turning firefox into an ai browser

It has everything to do with it. Mozilla explicitly talked about AI in the context of their relatively new translation feature a year or two back. Live captions also uses "AI". The term AI includes machine learning in marketing speech.

If that was the case that means Firefox is already an AI browser. But he wouldn’t be talking about AI browsers if he planned on maintaining the current features and approach, would he?

Technically, many of those things often were AI.

They just existed before the GenAI craze and no one cared because AI wasn't a buzzword at the time. Google Translate absolutely was based on ML before OpenAI made it a big deal to have things "based on AI".

But just putting stuff in your browser that hooks into third-party services that use ML isn't enough anymore. It has to be front and center otherwise, you're losing the interest of... well, someone. I'm not sure who at this point. I don't care, personally.

Yes, tools have used machine learning, nobody is questioning or denying that.

But that’s not what the CEO of mozilla means when he says he will turn Firefox into an AI browser.

It means there will be stupid fucking LLMs shoved in your face.

Many of these things were "AI" but the marketing hype hadn't gotten there yet. E.g. the local translation in FF is a transformer model, as was Google translate in the cloud since 2018 (and still "AI" looong before that, just not transformer based).

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