Facebook's new polyglot AI can translate between 100 languages

The news: Facebook is open-sourcing a new AI language model called M2M-100 that can translate between any pair among 100 languages. This is in contrast to previous multilingual models, which heavily rely on English as an intermediate. A Chinese to French translation, for example, typically passes from Chinese to English and then English to French, which increases the chance of introducing errors. Data curation: The model was trained on 7.5 billion sentence pairs. In order to compile a data set that large, the researchers relied heavily on automated curation.