The development of perfect machine translation would definitely make us rethink our notions of authorship and copyright if or when we reach that point.
No Language Left Behind: Meta’s Massive Multilingual Machine
Once again, tech giant Meta has made waves in the machine translation community. The company recently released a major research update on its No Language Left Behind project, which now accommodates 200 languages.
Meta calls the NLLB project “a first-of-its-kind, AI breakthrough bosnia and herzegovina mobile database project that open-sources models capable of delivering evaluated, high-quality translations between 200 languages—including low-resource languages like Asturian, Luganda, Urdu, and more.” What does that mean? Let’s break it down:
First of its kind. Multilingual machine translation models exist, but none on the scale of what Meta has done. NLLB-200 far surpasses Meta’s own previous M2M-100 model, which could translate among 100 languages without using English as an intermediary.
Open-sourced models. This means that the code for NLLB-200 is freely available for anyone, particularly researchers, to examine and develop.
Evaluated, high-quality translations. Benchmarks for assessing the quality of multilingual MT models are necessary for comparing different kinds. Meta has created one capable of accommodating NLLB-200’s massive linguistic scope.