Ah, okay. The scale is just too big for academia, makes sense.
I remember that in my study days (just masters, not PhD) we have been unable to beat Google Translate already for general tasks, but we could beat it on weird language pairs, just because we could get more training data (mostly by downloading some ebooks online) and tinker with the algorithm a bit.
But the scale argument - more data will be better - was true even back then... it was just easy to get better training data than Google for weird subtasks.
(Actually one of my professors is now Big Guy of that "European Commission Approved LLM" research project that was in news few months ago. I am ... interested how that turns out. https://openeurollm.eu/ )
I remember that in my study days (just masters, not PhD) we have been unable to beat Google Translate already for general tasks, but we could beat it on weird language pairs, just because we could get more training data (mostly by downloading some ebooks online) and tinker with the algorithm a bit.
But the scale argument - more data will be better - was true even back then... it was just easy to get better training data than Google for weird subtasks.
(Actually one of my professors is now Big Guy of that "European Commission Approved LLM" research project that was in news few months ago. I am ... interested how that turns out. https://openeurollm.eu/ )