Study: Back-to-basics approach can match or outperform AI in language analysis
manchester.ac.uk
manchester.ac.uk
The underlying paper itself is more precise, comparing against LUAR, a 2021 method based on bert-style embeddings (i.e. a model with 82M parameters, which is 0.2% the size of e.g. the recent OS Gemma models). I don't fault the authors of the paper at all for this, their method is interesting and more interpretable! But you can check the publication history, their paper was uploaded originally in 2024: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.08462
A good example of why some folks are bearish on journals.
"AI bad" seems to sell in some circles, and while there are many level-headed criticisms to be made of current AI fads, I don't think this qualifies.
"Researchers found that a relatively simple, linguistically grounded method can perform as well as - and in some cases better than - complex artificial intelligence systems in identifying authorship.
The study suggests that increasingly sophisticated AI is not always necessary for high-performing writing analysis, particularly when methods are designed around established principles of how language works."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06340-3/figures/2
TL;DR, probably never.
Like...it doesn't work on cats. It doesn't translate smiles.
If "nafnfowmfowl grtakkan ssshelpik" means "Temba, his arms wide" then the translation was correct. The fact that the crew mostly faileld to understand the communication is on them, not the translator.
This can also be seen in Data. Just because he can speak all sorts of languages and understand a majority of communications, he doesn't really know Riker's love of Troi because his translation matrix isn't designed for that in the same way that the ship's isn't designed to interpret intent.
You don't even need to go to Darmok to see this limitation, really. The fact that the translator provides human translations of klingon speech is not enough to understand their cultural intricacies. The same could be said of "pon farr" being a "time of mating". That knowledge alone could not have prepared Kirk for the trial or even hinted at there being a trial.
The translator is neither mind reader nor cultural liason. If it were we wouldn't have needed Troi.
Your Star Trek comparison is also incorrect. Following your logic, we’ve had a “bonafide universal translator” for a while now with websites like Google Translate (and so on). But none of these websites or AI tools are capable of learning languages on the fly purely from context and with minimal input data (that’s the magic of Trek’s UT, what they call linguacode).
No, AIs have not “solved” language in any way.
wait ,, imagine actually clocking the LLM like that ??? lowkey big brain energy tbh . no cap that would eat frfr bro is literally cooking,,
Example of LLMs doing well in similar tasks: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.16800
What applications do you think make the most sense so far?
The stock market crashes once in a while. Shit happens. The long-term outlook is unlikely to change nearly as much, unless you think there will be systemic macroeconomic changes.
Because LLM models have already amortized the man-years cost of collecting, curating and training on text corpuses?