What we owe to translators and gamers

There are a lot of people that have contributed to the rise of AI, from developers to mathematicians. But there are two groups a lot of people didn’t know had something to do with it. Gamers and translators of the world, this one is for you.

I studied Translation and Interpreting and worked as a translator for many years. I’m also an avid gamer, so this is something I’m always eager to tell people about. AI as we know it today wouldn’t be possible without these two groups.

At this point, we’ve all heard of how AI works. This has been made possible largely thanks to new tech, particularly powerful GPUs. Historically, CPUs were only able to do so much sequentially, and that wasn’t enough to run video games that were more and more demanding. So GPUs started to get better and better. And gamers were happy to spend their money on them so they could run their favourite game at ultra graphics and no FPS drop. Enter AI, a technology that needs exactly that! Hardware that can run many calculations at the same time.

And what about translators? The story is similar. Google created the transformer architecture first to improve their translation services. It was accidental that this was then used for AI. And in order to train their large language models companies started hiring thousands of translators and using the huge existing corpus of translations from institutions like the EU or UN.

In a nutshell, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and all sorts of models wouldn’t be possible today without the billions of dollars spent by gamers and the millions of hours invested by translators on translating documents from one language to another. So if you use AI daily and have gamer or translator friends, say thanks to them next time you see them.