[v4dok]

This is important work. And think about African or southeast Asian languages, they are even more screwed. We need to make sure that AI multilingual to avoid total English domination of culture.

[c7DJTLrn]

>We need to make sure that AI multilingual to avoid total English domination of culture.

Not saying English is an ideal language, but I'm interested in why you think it shouldn't dominate. Wouldn't a universal language be a good thing?

[aziaziazi]

Languages are like frameworks, they (slightly) guide your thinking. Think about the same stuff in different languages and you’ll probably get more ideas about it than in one language only.

[pjc50]

A lingua franca is useful and probably inevitable. The downside is language and cultural loss. Works in translation are rarely quite as good, especially humor and wordplay. This is why various countries have "local language quota" rules for media; although derided by English speakers and HN, they're a way to keep the local language, culture and identity alive.

[hiAndrewQuinn]

Not from an aesthetic sense. I think it's really cool that we have a lot of languages. I'm personally willing to pay a high price in inconvenience to keep that coolness around, although not everyone would.

However I also don't think we will have to. Machine translation and language learning are substitute goods -- the better the former gets, the fewer people who will feel any desire to pursue the latter, because it just won't be that big of a deal to translate between X and Y anyway.

A universal second language for commerce is a fine middle ground, though.

[latexr]

The languages you think in affect your decision making, your creativity, how you perceive the world. If we were restricted to a single language, we’d lose as individuals and as a species.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/17/how-learning...

[otabdeveloper4]

For some reason it is only monolingual people who ever say this.

[tellarin]

Project Aya is one such attempt at a multi-lingual model (targeting 101 languages):

- https://txt.cohere.com/aya-multilingual/

- https://aya.for.ai

I'm a contributor to the project and all data and model will be open-sourced.

We're looking for contributors in many languages!

[mchaver]

It is a concern because presumably most people in office jobs are going to need to be able to use these tools, but I am somewhat comforted to know one language that AI systems do not understand well yet because of lack of texts. However, I think that will be short lived.

[loxdalen]

I can speak in my own language with chat gpt without much issue

[rjtavares]

While I can speak in Portuguese without much issues (except being hard for them to stick to European Portuguese), I've nooticed that sometimes it uses a clear translation of an English expression that does not feel natural in Portuguese at all.

[asutekku]

You can, but it will get facts more likely wrong than if you converse with it in english

[benatkin]

This will be easy, it will go from mostly English to hyperpolyglot quickly.

[DoingIsLearning]

If it's training on available online corpus then it will go quickly mostly for English and Mandarin.

Most countries' classic texts and books are still undigitized sitting in Libraries and public archives.

Also book publishing market and online publishing are proportional to total population, smaller country means less content.

[ben_w]

The issue raised in the article is that there may not be enough training material in many languages to do this.

I find this very plausible.