True Zero-shot MT

Little over a week ago, Gemini 1.5 reported close to human-level performance on MTOB, a recent challenging translation dataset. In this newsletter, we’ll dig into this result, explore true zero-shot machine translation (MT), and consider how to teach LLMs a new language like humans.Low-resource MTTo set the scene, let’s first consider what it means for a language to be considered “low-resource”. As with LLMs, the performance of MT models depends on the amount of training data—both parallel and m...