A funny thing happened on November 4, although no public announcement was made Google Translate suddenly started to do a much much better job . Historically machine translation has improved a lot but the rate of improvement has slowed down over the last 4 or 5 years, until November 4. And then Boom! For example before November 4 it would translate the Jorge Borges quote " *Uno no es lo que es por lo que escribe, sino por lo que ha leído"* as:
“ *One is not what is for what he writes, but for what he has read*” Pretty clunky, but after November 4 it was: “*You are not what you write, but what you have read*” People in Japan were among the first to notice that something was up and within hours of the change the topic was the # 1 trend on Japanese Twitter. Somebody took a paragraph from a Japanese translation of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” made by a human and asked Google-translate to translate it back into English. One of the below is pure Hemingway and the other is Hemingway translated to Japanese and then translated by Google back to English, see if you can tell which is which: *"Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."* *"Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The summit of the west is called “Ngaje Ngai” in Masai, the house of God. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude".* The first one is pure Hemingway 's and the second went through 2 translations, one of them make by a machine. Pretty damn good, the only giveaway is the lack of an article before the word "leopard". Odd it captured the subtlety but missed the "the" and a "a". But compare that with what Google-Translate would have give you just one day before: *"Kilimanjaro is 19,710 feet of the mountain covered with snow, and it is said that the highest mountain in Africa. Top of the west, “Ngaje Ngai” in the Maasai language, has been referred to as the house of God. The top close to the west, there is a dry, frozen carcass of a leopard. Whether the leopard had what the demand at that altitude, there is no that nobody explained."* Granted it remembered to put an article before "leopard" but overall I think you'll agree it's a greatly inferior translation. So what happened? It turns out it all started in February, Google decided to switch over from a symbolic AI system that they and everybody else has been using for machine translation for the last 30 years to a neural net. They figured it would take at least 3 years to make the change because they not only had to write a lot of code they'd also have to make a new chip called a “tensor processing unit” to deal with the heavy user volume. But things went much smother than expected and in mid March they stopped all new work on the old symbolic AI translation system to concentrate on neural net translation, and by early November they were finished. Google thinks a system like they've developed that recognized patterns and patterns of patterns that worked so well for translation could work equally well for other things, like going through millions of pages of documents for legal discovery far faster and cheaper than any human lawyer could. It should also work to greatly improve image recognition; and that would put more than just 3 and a half million truck drivers out of work, neural networks are much better at finding tumors in X-rays and MRI's than human radiologist. It seems to me that in the health care field the only two areas where humans are still better than machines are nursing and surgery. Translators, doctors, lawyers, truck drivers.... although our civilization will generate more wealth than ever before people are going to find it increasingly difficult to find a job. The New York Times has a good article about all this: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/magazine/the-great-ai-awakening.html?rref= collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmagazine John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
