Meta has open-sourced a new AI model called No Language Left Behind, which is capable of translating 200 languages, including 55 African languages.
While Meta is keen to use the new tool to improve its own products, open-sourcing will allow the model to be used by technologists to build other tools such as AI assistant.
Meta expects the model to support more than 25 billion translations across its own products every day. In addition to translating content and delivering better ads, the model will be used to detect harmful content and misinformation.
NLLB nearly doubles the number of languages covered by a single state-of-the-art AI model, and improves the quality of translations by an average of 44% compared to previous AI research.
Meta researchers built FLORES-200, a dataset that helps them evaluate NLLB performance in 40,000 different language directions. Meta also performed other automated metric evaluations, as well as human evaluations, to determine the quality of translations.
In support of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Meta will award up to $200,000 in grants for effective use of NLLB-200 to researchers and non-profit organizations focused on sustainability, food security, and others.
The sources for this piece include an article in ZDNet.