Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, which owns Facebook, wants to break language barriers across the globe using artificial intelligence (AI).
Meta announced an ambitious AI-driven project, which will be vital to building its Metaverse.
The company has built an open-sourced ‘No Language Left Behind’ NLLB-200. This single Artificial Intelligence (AI) model is the first to translate across 200 languages, including 55 African languages.
“Africa is a continent with very high linguistic diversity, and language barriers exist day to day. We are pleased to announce that 55 African languages will be included in this machine translation research, making it a major breakthrough for our continent,” Mr Balkissa Ide Siddo, Public Policy Director for Africa said while speaking about the launch of the AI model.
The open-sourced AI model will also translate 145 more languages worldwide that aren’t supported by current translation systems.
“We call this project No Language Left Behind. The 200-language model has over 50 billion parameters to give a sense of the scale. We trained it using our new Research SuperCluster, one of the world’s fastest AI supercomputers,” Zuckerberg says.