Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate promising translation performance among various natural languages. However, many LLMs especially the open-sourced ones, such as BLOOM and LLaMA, are English-dominant and support only dozens of natural languages, making the potential of LLMs on language translation less explored. In this work, we present BigTranslate which adapts LLaMA that covers only 20 languages and enhances it with multilingual translation capability on more than 100 languages. BigTranslate is built upon LLaMA-13B and it is optimized in three steps. First, we continue training LLaMA with massive Chinese monolingual data. Second, we continue training the model with a large-scale parallel dataset that covers 102 natural languages. Third, we instruct-tune the foundation model with multilingual translation instructions, leading to our BigTranslate model. The preliminary experiments on multilingual translation show that BigTranslate performs comparably with ChatGPT and Google Translate in many languages and even outperforms ChatGPT in 8 language pairs. We release the BigTranslate model and hope it can advance the research progress.

The group is now the subject of an employee letter seeking their removal

There's been lots of drama over at OpenAI as of late. First, CEO Sam Altman was fired! Then he was … maybe going to be unfired? Then he was hired by Microsoft! To be clear, Nitish Pahwa writes, this saga, with all its twists and turns, was a little stupid--but not as stupid as it looks. He breaks down exactly what's happened and explains why it's best to consider it the first skirmish in a war over A.I. Did you know that more than 30 states in the U.S. have laws that penalize individuals or businesses that boycott Israel over the treatment of Palestinians?

OpenAI created ChatGPT, a popular chatbot that has taken the tech world by storm, instigating a flood of investment and interest in AI. OpenAI began in San Francisco in 2015 as a non-profit trying to build "artificial general intelligence," or AGI, which is essentially software that's as smart as humans. It's original mission was to keep advanced AI out of the sole hands of huge corporations.

It's been an eventful weekend at OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco. In a surprise move Friday, the company's board of directors fired co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, which set off an institutional crisis that has seen senior staff resign in protest with nearly 700 rank-and-file employees threatening to do the same. Now the board is facing calls for its own resignation, even after Microsoft had already swooped in to hire Altman's cohort away for its own AI projects. Here's everything you need to know about the situation to hold your own at Thanksgiving on Thursday. This saga began forever ago by internet standards, or last Thursday in the common parlance.

Almost the entire staff of OpenAI has now signed a letter threatening to leave and join a new venture led by ousted CEO, Sam Altman. Some 738 out of its around 770 employees, about 95 percent of the company, are now listed on the letter released early this morning. The letter calls for Altman and his fellow OpenAI cofounder and close associate Greg Brockman to be reinstated, for the board that fired Altman and removed Brockman from his position as chair to resign, and for new board members to be appointed. Altman was fired from his position as CEO of OpenAI on Friday. Brockman was removed from his position as chair and quit the company hours later in protest over Altman's removal.

The ascension of an insider CEO can be a bit underwhelming. When Satya Nadella took the helm of Microsoft in 2014, some employees and investors were disappointed. The search committee had spent months sifting through more than 100 potential leaders, looking for someone who could revive the spirit of innovation that had once defined the company. Along the way, some Wall Street analysts interpreted the fact that no clear external candidate was emerging to indicate that "Microsoft couldn't attract an appealing CEO after years of dwindling relevance," the Wall Street Journal reported. And then, on a frigid January day, they got a 22-year Microsoft veteran as CEO.

Stepping into such a significant role can't be easy, but Shear appears to have a sense of early priorities. In his announcement post on X early Monday, he outlined three areas of focus for his first 30 days on the job: He said he intends to investigate "the entire process" that brought the company to this point, open lines of communication to partners and OpenAI employees and rebuild the management and leadership teams "in light of recent departures."

Twitch co-founder is vocal critic of efforts to rush development of artificial intelligence tools

"If many OpenAI employees choose to migrate to Microsoft to join Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman, then not only would Microsoft hold a license to OpenAI's (intellectual property) up to (artificial general intelligence, an AI-system that's generally smarter than humans), but Microsoft would also be effectively acquiring OpenAI's core differentiation -- its ambitious and experienced technical talent," Havemeyer added.