The team asked ChatGPT-4 to read Visser’s book and then translate 500 Kalamang sentences into English. A human expert outperformed the LLM in accuracy and natural flow—though it took that person 10 hours to review the grammar book and then several weeks for translation. However, on a recent retest with Google’s new Gemini 1.5, the researchers found the AI actually beat out the human translation. What does this mean? Well, if AI can almost instantly digest and then translate a completely new language, there are endless opportunities for how AI might translate the world’s knowledge into rare languages, reaching people who might never have otherwise had a formal education.
