There are entire categories of saas and enterprise vendors that are about to be completely blown away.

For example -- not long ago, when you wanted to do l10n/i18n for your business, you'd have to go through a pretty painful process of integrating with eg translations.com. If you're running an ecommerce site with a lot of new products (and product descriptions) coming online quickly, that whole process would be painful and expensive.

Fast forward to today -- a well-crafted prompt to Llama3.1 within a product pipeline makes that vendor completely obsolete. Now, you could argue that this kind of automation isn't new, you could have done it with an api call to Google translate or something similar, and sure, that's possible, but now you have one single interface into a very broad, capable brain to carry out any number of tasks.

If I was a vendor whose business was at all centered around language or data ETL or anything that involves taking text and doing something with it, I would be absolutely terrified at someone writing a 20-line python script with a good system prompt that would make my entire business's reason for being evaporate.

That's not the state of today at all, and probably doesn't represent the near or medium future.

Using the unmonitored output of a LLM-translation service for your commercial content, outputting in languages you can't read, represents a big reduction in quality assurance and greatly increases the risk of brand embarrassment and possibly even product misrepresentation, while leaving you with no recourse to blame or shift liability.

> If I was a vendor whose business was at all centered around language or data ETL or anything that involves taking text and doing something with it, I would be absolutely terrified at someone writing a 20-line python script with a good system prompt that would make my entire business's reason for being evaporate.

The more likely future is that existing translation houses will increasingly turn to LLM-assistance to raise the efficiency and lower the skill threshold for their staff, who still deliver the actual key values of quality assurance and accountability. This will likely drive prices down and greatly reduce how many people are working as translators in these firms, but it's an opportunity for them, not a threat.

LLM's don't seem to be on track to be the foolproof end-user tools that the earyl hype promised. They don't let us magically do everything ourselves and (like crypto being imcompatible with necessary regulations), they don't offer all the other assurances that orgs need when they hire vendors. But they can very likely accelerate trained people in certain cases and still have an impact on industry through specialty vendors that build internal workflows around them.