Google Translate is turning 20! 🎉. There are 20 fun facts and tips in the thread below.
Translate is one of my favorite Google products because it brings us all closer together!
I've been involved with a couple of things over the years. The first was our deployment of the initial system in 2006, which provided a huge leap forward in quality because it used a much larger 5-gram language model trained on trillions of words of text (indeed, probably the first trillion token language model training in the world: paper has some nice heads showing scaling-law-like quality improvement from scaling to more data/compute).
See "Large Language Models in Machine Translation", Thorsten Brants, Ashok C. Popat, Peng Xu, Franz J. Och and Jeffrey Dean, https://t.co/QnK7lllpoj
The second major collaboration was in 2016 when we moved Translate over from a statistical machine translation approach to using deep neural networks. This approach relied on two key innovations. The first was Google's work on Sequence-to-Sequence models (https://t.co/W9c0a0PXoV). The second was our development of TPUs, custom cups that improved the performance of inference for deep neural networks by 30-80X over existing CPUs and GPUs of the day (and reduced latency by 15-30X). This made launching compute-intensive language model services like Translate feasible for hundreds of millions of users. See "In-Datacenter Performance Analysis of a Tensor Processing Unit", Norman P. Jouppi et al. https://t.co/qpJl7FM6EO
GNMT paper:
"Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation", Yonghui Wu, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Wolfgang Macherey, Maxim Krikun, Yuan Cao, Qin Gao, Klaus Macherey, Jeff Klingner, Apurva Shah, Melvin Johnson, Xiaobing Liu, Łukasz Kaiser, Stephan Gouws, Yoshikiyo Kato, Taku Kudo, Hideto Kazawa, Keith Stevens, George Kurian, Nishant Patil, Wei Wang, Cliff Young, Jason Smith, Jason Riesa, Alex Rudnick, Oriol Vinyals, Greg Corrado, Macduff Hughes, and Jeffrey Dean, https://t.co/YasV0MEpxM
Most recently, we have advanced Translate further using Gemini models.
Each of these advances relied on research that have major quality leaps over the existing status quo translation approaches, bringing better quality and connectedness to all of our Translate users! 🎉
Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter (now X) and Block, on why treating AI as a "copilot" is a losing strategy:
@jack argues that most companies are approaching AI in a way that will make it nearly impossible for them to survive.
"I think most of the industry is thinking about AI as like a co-pilot, as something that is augmented onto, rather than like how do you just rebuild our whole company with this as the core."
His concern is that bolting AI onto existing structures produces companies that look indistinguishable from each other, and from the AI labs themselves.
"If it doesn't make sense for your business to do that and you end up being or looking very similar or rhyming too closely with the frontier labs, then I think it's going to be very, very challenging to differentiate and survive."
This thinking has been driving his decisions since early 2024, when these tools "really came to bear."
That's when his team began building Goose, an agent coding harness, as part of a broader effort to rebuild around AI rather than layer it on top.
The core insight?
Speeding up old workflows with AI is a short-term gain every competitor will match. Real differentiation comes from rebuilding the company itself around intelligence.
KAKEHASHI Tech Blogで、新設ポスト「VP of Data & AI」就任インタビューを公開しました。新執行役員の鳥越とCTO湯前が、生成AIの組織活用や「攻めと守り」のデータ戦略を激白。カケハシが向き合う、未来への「覚悟」を語り尽くします。ぜひご覧ください!https://t.co/1SU7ch3eUi