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Google Translate uses an LLM, last I heard.

It switched very recently I think if at all. It was way worse at translations than Gemini even at the beginning of this year. Especially between a pair of languages other than English. It was mixing two completely different words that are the same in English.

I've seen it make very LLM mistakes, esp. "hiccups" and palilalia this month.

Only since 2023.

WDYM? It used an encoder-decoder transformer model long before 2023 (and also long before decoder-only transformers à la GPT became the new standard).

Most people seem to believe LLM only describe these decoder-only architectures, but the term predate them by a big margin. BERT (encoder-only) was a large language model, and there were even language models before transformers were even a thing.

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