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🔆 How Many Languages Does Your Tech Speak? Linguistic Diversity & LLMs
Breaking down Natural Language Processing, Microsoft and Apple back away from OpenAI board, and how does AI pronounce your name.
Sarah, Emma and Allegra at Lumiera.ai
July 18, 2024
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🗞️ Issue 27 // ⏱️ Read Time: 7 min
Hello 👋
👀 Have you ever had AI technology say your name or the name of a friend and butcher it beyond recognition? You are not alone. This week, Team Lumiera looks at the intersection of language and technology, exploring how Large Language Models interpret and generate human language through Natural Language Processing.
Linguistic diversity in AI goes beyond just understanding different languages. It involves comprehending various dialects, accents, and forms of communication influenced by economic diversity and disabilities that affect speech and writing. Keep reading to learn more!
In this week's newsletter
What we’re talking about: Linguistics in Large Language Models (LLMs) - discussing its foundations, implications, and the potential it holds for businesses and communities worldwide.
How it’s relevant: Today, most AI systems are trained primarily on English data, potentially excluding a significant portion of the global population. This current lack of linguistic diversity in AI has consequences such as excluding people from healthcare due to language barriers.
Why it matters: As we develop more linguistically diverse NLP, we're opening up possibilities such as smoother global teamwork, preserving indigenous language and culture, building tech that works for people with different dialects and accents, and enabling better customer service and localisation for global companies.
Big tech news of the week…
🖥️US Senate Committee on Science, Commerce, and Transportation convened a hearing to discuss the implications of AI on data privacy and protection. Thursday's session touched on growing concerns from both industry and experts about the patchwork of state laws for AI and data privacy that continues to expand in the absence of national standards.
🌍 SenseTime SenseNova 5.5: China’s first real-time multimodal AI model. The upgraded SenseNova 5.5 boasts a 30% improvement in overall performance compared to its predecessor, SenseNova 5.0, which was released just two months earlier.
⚖️Microsoft and Apple back away from OpenAI board, amid regulatory scrutiny. Microsoft has dropped its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI and Apple has backed out of joining OpenAI’s nonprofit board. Microsoft states the reasons to be that its role observer is no longer needed, however, some see this as a reaction to growing concern among competition regulators.