Has anybody noticed that the problem of machine translation has been, like, solved?

Reddit r/artificial 10/06/26, 05:42 PM News

Summary

An essay arguing that AI, particularly LLMs, has quietly achieved near-perfect machine translation, effectively cracking the language barrier after decades of mediocre progress.

With all the fuss over AI and what it can do, I feel like we've totally glossed over the fact that AI has casually solved something that has been a problem for decades. I was born the year after the microprocessor was invented, and I've kept a very close eye on technology as it has developed. And the problem of machine translation has been with us for a while. It used to be absolutely terrible. Then it got to the point where you could sort of tell what the native speaker who wrote the original was trying to say. And now, it's almost perfectly solved. Give any good LLM a document in one language and ask it to give you the same document in any other, and it's like you asked somebody who was extremely fluent and eloquent in both languages. The language barrier has been cracked. The Universal Translator is here. We have the Babel Fish. And it seems like nobody is talking about it.

Original Article

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