Ondřej Bojar presents The 60th meeting of PRAGUE COMPUTER SCIENCE SEMINAR

AI Stolen by Transformers!

Sequence-to-sequence deep learning models originating in the area of machine
translation (MT) have exploded the public interest in AI, effectively stealing
the name of the field for the current years. To MT researchers, this is
reminiscent of 2013-2015 when deep learning invaded the field of MT and
completely rewrote the methodology.

In my talk, I will mention some of our achievements in translation thanks to
Transformers and demonstrate our heavily multilingual speech-to-text
translation, but I will primarily illustrate and warn about common
misconceptions and evaluation fallacies we know well from the MT domain, e.g.
attributing observed gains to wrong reasons.

Unfortunately, the current AI hype is fuelled to some extent by such
mismeasurements. If we do not bring more technically sound and realistic
assessment of large language models' abilities into the discussion, we are
risking another AI winter, i.e. a sudden decline in interest and both private
and public funding into AI development.