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Comment by klntsky | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is excited about LLM abilities to help with language learning, while completely ignoring the fact that for most people LLMs will make the learning unneeded. There will be less experts in the field, and therefore we will lose the part of language and foreign literature understanding not captured by statmodels. Which is a huge part (subtle contexts in poetry, etc)

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You aren't wrong, but this has been a dilemma with every new technology. The camera had that effect, modern metalworking had that effect, even tractors had that effect.

It's definitely a problem we should be talking about, but we can't go back in time or remain frozen, the genie never goes back in the bottle. We have to move forward towards the future while salvaging the parts of the past we want to bring with us.

This line of thought goes back to Socrates and his supposed views on writing. (That it weakens the memory)

The major difference is that in the event that there's a catastrophic event, we won't be able to build the tech we need because the intermediate steps will be lost.

It is also how we know there hasn't been a civilization more advanced than us that left without a trace. All the oil that was easy to extract has been extracted.

I don't think that follows, it is easy to imagine an alternative history without all the hissyfits about nuclear fission or with real investment into nuclear fusion starting in the 70s.

It's not just oil, it's also coal and other integral resources that are now difficult to extract because we are at the upper level of the S-curve and efficiency has dropped.

Well, coal is the resource that's gone, but all the metals - iron, silver, aluminum - aren't depleted (they don't disappear when we use them) and are much more accessible than they were before, because we dug them out from deep underground, refined them (especially for aluminum) and concentrated them in various places. If civilization would disappear, our scrapyards are better mining locations than anything the Romans had.

"What if something happens to all the books"

> Raytheon has called in retired engineers to teach its employees how to build the Stinger missiles heavily used by Ukraine’s military—using blueprints drawn up during the Carter administration.

https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/06/raytheon-calls-r...

And of course, lots of resources have been depleted.

We need efficiency when we want to maximize comfort and minimize labor.

But nothing forbids people to pursue less efficient endeavors during their free time. There are people maintaining old cars and locomotive. There are people gardening or woodworking "inefficiently" for their own pleasure.

What we remove is the need to force people to work on these fields. Whether we abandon them altogether depends solely on our culture.

> But nothing forbids people to pursue less efficient endeavors during their free time.

Assuming they have free time.

As someone who loves writing in 3 languages (French and German being my native languages, English the third), playing with Claude (and to a lesser degree gpt4) has actually made me play and investigate the nuances of languages so much more. It does a great job of course doing stylistic transformations, which on their own are always stilted, but are great inspiration. But it also does a phenomenal job at explaining the nuances between the language, say when I want to explain why a certain German phrasing “feels” different to me.

Certainly seeing the amount of people never learning the language of the country they emigrated to, this is a problem we already have (and in my situation, never going to country where I don’t speak the language).

I think humans are going to continue nerding with language just as much as they ever have, I do really think it’s an innate drive, and llms are a mind blowing tool to do just so.

> Which is a huge part (subtle contexts in poetry, etc)

Certainly, but from what I remember of my GCSE English Literature back at the turn of the millennium, my fellow students and I didn't understand most of that subtly even when it was famous poets in our native language.

Shakespeare may be unsurprising in this regard given the age (why eye of newt and leg of toad? Some say common names of herbs, others that it's just some amusingly vulgar items), but we were also just as oblivious to the lived experience of being gassed in the trenches as per Dulce et Decorum Est or a cavalry charge as per The Charge of the Light Brigade in English as we would have been if this had been a second language.

I'm not sure about "unneeded". Important motivations why people learn a foreign language are because they want to speak with native speakers in that language without an intermediate (because they move to that country, or because they have a partner speaking that language), or because they find that language interesting/beautiful, or because they want to read or listen to original sources. Machine translation doesn't remove any of those motivations.

> while completely ignoring the fact that for most people LLMs will make the learning unneeded

Good luck using an LLM to talk to strangers in a bar in a foreign language.

This is literally the functionality from the recent OpenAI demo

Yeah, I remember a similar demo, 8 years ago for Skype:

https://youtu.be/G87pHe6mP0I?si=s-BjpVGApB15ciSl

I'm curious to see the next demo, 8 years from now.

The voice chat works pretty great in other languages as well (seriously what's the point of ragging on a feature you haven't used ?) so not sure what the point of this is. There are countless more demos that were not in fact just a demo.

Excuse me, but, what feature are you talking about and how do you know I haven't used it?

The new hands off voice chat that Open AI is rolling out to users. I know because your snide comment makes no sense if you have (It works). And I especially know now because people who actually have used a feature they rag actually say so after the call out, not turn the question around on the accuser.

I'm sorry, but I asked for a clarifying question: which feature do you mean? My earlier comment mentions both Skype and ChatGPT. Which one did you mean I haven't used, and how would you know I haven't, except for the guesswork in your latest comment?

Also I did not realise I was being accused of something? What am I being accused of?

This comment,

>Good luck using an LLM to talk to strangers in a bar in a foreign language.

Followed by,

>This is literally the functionality from the recent OpenAI demo

You respond with,

>Yeah, I remember a similar demo, 8 years ago for Skype: https://youtu.be/G87pHe6mP0I?si=s-BjpVGApB15ciSl

>I'm curious to see the next demo, 8 years from now.

You're going to pretend this isn't a snide comment but asking a clarifying question. Really ? Why are you being intentionally obtuse ?

I'm sorry, have I insulted you? Why are you calling me obtuse?

Homie you're the only one talking about Skype. How many times do they need to say "OpenAI" before that clicks?

A cool aspect here is that the LLM can take over the conversation if you don't know what to say/are bad at smalltalk.

most Latin text have been translated once and more then 100 years ago while most ancient Arabic text have never been translated. this is an old problem.

I see AI as savior here esp with reconstructing old languages we only have small amount of text saved

Which oldest Arabic text do you mean?

Most ancient texts (i.e. Egyptian papyri) are expected to be of too little use to even scan, let alone translate.

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