Hacker News Reader

Comment by dirtyaura | Hacker News Reader

Crazy thought: what if the AI is in 10-20 years the first field in which major breakthroughs will be first published in Mandarin instead of in English. Language is power, and currently English speaking countries have the edge.

View on HN

Debatable. If we add up all the English speaking or English-inclined countries, we get: the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, India, Nigeria, South Africa, all of Northern Europe and plenty of other places which are culturally closer to English-speaking countries than to Mandaring-speaking ones (one :) ).

China has a huge mass but it's just one object. The Anglosphere has several big objects and a ton of smaller ones and overall I'd say it is much bigger and has a longer reach.

I prefer the garden vs the forest analogy when it comes to China vs the Rest. As our models of never ending growth break down, transitions to newer sustainable models require controls that China is in a better position to exercise than the current chaotic environments we see elsewhere. I see lot of confusion in the minds of leaders in the rest of the world of what they should transition too. And that confusion percolates down economic and r&d activities. It's not going to resolve it self any time soon given the clowns our freedom and idea spreading social media is propping up.

Ofcourse even the best gardeners can fuck up but if I was betting on the best outcomes in 10-20 years I would bet on China.

Those top-rated Chinese researchers are publishing in English. Their Chinese-only venues are not at the caliber that they would consider publishing ground breaking work to.

Yet.

Critical mass is a weird thing.

Of course, but especially in the applied sector of ML, it can happen that interesting blog posts and code examples are increasingly written in Mandarin.

The *ACL conferences (major NLP venues) decided to allow presentations to be in Mandarin now; the rationale being that a lot of presentations were in such poor English already, might as well let half the audience be engaged.

It will take at least a few more years before submissions are allowed in Chinese: reviewers can't be assumed to know Chinese. The momentum is there though.

Well, if English-speaking countries can't keep up with Chinese-speaking ones as far as AI is concerned, hopefully they will at least make enough progress to do accurate Chinese-to-English machine translation.

I'd hope that by then AI would have advanced well enough to enable us to navigate the language jungle more easily. Who knows, maybe the theory related to this will be one of those seminal Mandarin papers?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com