We could communicate with people before LLMs just fine though? We have hand gestures and some people learn multiple languages and google translate was pretty solid. I got by just fine in countries where I didn’t know the language because hand gestures work or someone speaks English.

What is the value of losing our uniqueness to a computer that lies and makes us all talk the same?

▲

Kiro 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Incredible that we happen to be alive at the exact moment humanity peaked in its interlingual communication. With Google Translate and hand gestures there is no need to evolve it any further.

▲

carlosjobim 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can maybe order in a restaurant or ask the way with hand gestures. But surely you must be able to take a higher perspective than your own, and realize that there's enormous amounts of exchange between nations with differing language, and all of this relies on some form of translation. Hundreds of millions of people all over the world have to deal with language barriers.

Google Translate was far from solid, the quality of translations were so bad before LLMs that it simply wasn't an option for most languages. It would sometimes even translate numbers incorrectly.

	▲	Profan 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		LLMs are here and Google Translate is still bad (surely, if it was easy as just plugging the miraculous perfect llms into it, it would be perfect now?), I don't think people who think we've somehow solved translation actually understand how much it still deals extremely poorly with. And as others have said, language is more than just "I understand these words, this other person understands my words" (in the most literal sense, ignoring nuance here), but try getting that across to someone who believes you can solve language with a technical solution :)