Google Translate is a manifestation of Wittgenstein's theory of language

More than 60 years after philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's theories on language were published, the artificial intelligence behind Google Translate has provided a practical example of his hypotheses. Patrick Hebron, who works on machine learning in design at Adobe and studied philosophy with Wittgenstein expert Garry Hagberg for his bachelor's degree at Bard College, notes that the networks behind Google Translate are a very literal representation of Wittgenstein's work. Google employees have previously acknowledged that Wittgenstein's theories gave them a breakthrough in making their translation services more effective, but somehow, this key connection between philosophy of language and artificial intelligence has long gone under-celebrated and overlooked. The translation service relies on an algorithm created by Google employees called word2vec, which creates "vector representations" for words, which essentially means that each word is represented numerically. For the translations to work, programmers have to then create a "neural network," a form of machine learning, that's trained to understand how these words relate to each other.