On Wednesday, Meta (the company) announced its first big success, dubbed NLLB-200. It's an AI model that can speak in 200 tongues, including a number of less-widely spoken languages from across Asia and Africa, like Lao and Kamba.

Figure 1: No Language Left Behind (NLLB) dubbed 200 languages.

Figure 1 shows that Meta seemingly wants to understand all 7000 spoken languages on this planet. Six months ago, the company launched its ambitious No Language Left Behind (NLLB) project, training AI to translate seamlessly between numerous languages without having to go through English first.

According to a Wednesday blog post from the company, NLLB-200 can translate 55 African languages with “high-quality results.” Meta boasts that the model’s performance on the FLORES-101 benchmark surpassed existing state-of-the-art models by 44 percent on average, and by as much as 70 percent for select African and Indian dialects. [1]

That includes more than a hundred rarely-spoken languages, such as the languages of the Acehnese people of Indonesia and the Chokwe people of Central and Southern Africa, which have always been hard for computers to translate because they have very little presence online.

It's the latest development in artificial intelligence, a controversial area of science. There also will be a lot of resources released that allow everybody to use this model and retrain it on their own, fostering research in that area. [2]

The 200-language translation model has over 50 billion parameters and has been trained using Meta’s new Research Supercluster, which the company claims to be one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers. “The advances here will enable more than 25 billion translations every day across our apps,” the company announcement said.

“Communicating across languages is one superpower that AI provides, but as we keep advancing our AI work, it’s improving everything we do — from showing the most interesting content on Facebook and Instagram to recommending more relevant ads to keeping our services safe for everyone,” Meta-founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. [[3]

References:

1. https://www.engadget.com/meta-ai-translate-200-language-real-time-nllb-130023464.html?src=rss
2. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/meta-claims-breakthrough-superpower-ai-123900802.html?
3. https://analyticsindiamag.com/meta-open-sources-an-ai-model-that-can-translate-across-200-languages/

Cite this article:

Sri Vasagi K (2022), AI can now Translate 200 Languages in Real Time – Meta, AnaTechMaz, pp.129