HACKER Q&A
📣 sz4kerto

Will ChatGPT and co. force the world to learn conversational English?


People with mediocre or basic level English proficiency could search for some keywords then translate the results. Will they be severely disadvantaged when using advanced chat-like search engines? Will this force the world to learn English or will this increase global inequality even further?

  👤 codeptualize Accepted Answer ✓
ChatGPT is trained on different languages, in it's own words:

"As a language model developed by OpenAI, I am trained on many languages, including but not limited to: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch. What can I help you with today?"

I have tried Dutch and it's pretty good.

I think in general it's not that different from the search engines we already have, for many topics you'll find more results in English, but already automatic translation is pretty decent, so I think the barrier to consuming english content is only getting smaller.

I do think the ability to speak English can be a big advantage, even more so in tech. I think ChatGPT and co can actually be very useful tools for learning a language.

👤 PaulHoule
20 years ago it seemed to be almost all of the literature on NLP was about English language NLP. Now I read about a large language model in some other language almost every day, for instance on arXiv see

https://arxiv.org/search/?query=vietnamese&searchtype=all&so...

Chinese is said to have 1.2 M speakers contrasted to 1.5 M English speakers, that is enough that there is a very healthy scene for Chinese NLP research so the short term answer is that the Chinese will quickly have their own ChatGPT and we will also see products like that for other languages.