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At its core, it’s still doing what Google Assistant and Siri were doing since many years

Not sure what extra are we achieving here

Only if you consider Google Image Search and Google Nano Banana to be "the same thing" since they both produce an image based on text input!

Similarly, Google Translate's millions of lines of hand-rolled code has been entirely superseded by LLMs that do a vastly better job.

The LLM-based AI assistants are based on a wildly different technology stack with very different capabilities compared to the legacy "if-then-else" logic programming that Siri was based on.

Was Google Translate millions of lines of hand-rolled code? The Transformer architecture was invented for Google Translate, before it was used to build "LLMs".

I don't know about millions of lines of code, but Google Translate existed WELL BEFORE transformer architectures and relied on more traditional statistical machine translation techniques. They later moved to a neural machine translation technique, and then only after that in ~2019/2020 swapped to transformers.

Honestly a lot of us who worked in the translation sector remember NMT as being a huge step up and in some language-pairs even surpassing DeepL at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Neural_Machine_Translat...

Better surveillance.

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