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More in AI skepticism news: Turns out most AI benchmarks are bullshit!
https://rdi.berkeley.edu/blog/trustworthy-benchmarks-cont/
Specifically the following benchmarks are trivially exploitable: SWE-bench, WebArena, OSWorld, GAIA, Terminal-Bench, FieldWorkArena, and CAR-bench.
I don't have too much to add to this, but I'll try. Assuming this paper isn't bullshit itself, it makes you wonder why no one was looking more closely at the results submitted by various AI companies. In one of our other discussions about this recently, someone said:
When I asked if they had manually verified them, they said they hadn't. It seems a lot of the things people claim about AI and its capabilities are "too good to verify", similar to how salacious stories about the other tribe in culture war stories are "too good to verify". It seems to me that a lot of people want to believe that AGI, or the death of software development, or similar things, are right around the corner. As a result, they often believe whatever the claims of sociopaths like Sam Altman, or the weirdos who believe in AGI over at Anthropic, tell them. Including, potentially, the benchmark results we see published with every new release. On the other hand, to be fair, skeptics like me can certainly be quick to believe negative stories about AI. I mean, look at me rushing to post this negative story about it here.
Regardless, I am personally of the opinion that we are near a breaking point regarding AI. I think either the bubble is going to pop and a lot of the things people claimed AI was going to take over aren't going to materialize, or they are an we are in for some major economic disruption. I don't think "AGI" is around the corner in either case though. And certain professions like SEO slop writer, translator, and others are definitely disrupted forever regardless.
At least in the case of translators, I think you'd be surprised. I happen to be acquainted with a good number of professional translators and almost to a man all of them are still booked out in terms of work and make solid middle class incomes.
My understanding is that the "ChatGPT" moment for translation was around a decade ago when neural machine translation was first getting good. Already at this point, for translation tasks that didn't require professional-grade reliability or well-written prose, Google Translate or DeepL were basically already good enough; translation for things like manuals or brochures was commoditized well before transformers.
Of course LLM's write much better than DeepL, but in practice the set of translation tasks that can't be delegated to Google Translate or DeepL, but can be handled autonomously by a LLM, is actually quite small.
High-reliability translation tasks like legal, medical or diplomatic still require a human in the loop, and LLM's are still subpar at translation tasks that require a high level of interpretation, as in the case of literary translation. At a high level, a good literary translation can be thought of as a re-writing of the original work, and as of yet LLM's are still quite poor writers without significant human intervention.
This actually makes me happy to hear, based on some things I had read a few months ago it sounded like translators were struggling to find work. I've already had to deal with subpar LLM translations in some animes etc., and sadly I think companies like Crunchyroll are going to be too cheap to go back to real translators. Though it might be an improvement, given their human localizers's penchant for injecting modern woke politics into their translations.
Edit: typo
It is rather hard to feel sorry for human localizers given their obvious disdain for the content and those who consume it. For all the problems of LLMs, such seething hatred is rarely included.
Can you share some examples?
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