Lisbon-based translation platform Unbabel has unveiled its new AI product, with CEO Vasco Pedro telling CNBC that he expects three years from now that humans will not be needed to translate anything.
Dubbed Widn.AI, the new product is based on the company’s proprietary large language model (LLM) called Tower, which allows for translations in 32 languages. LLMs are AI systems designed to understand and generate human language by processing massive amounts of text data. Such AI models underpin products like Claude from Anthropic or Open AI’s ChatGPT.
They also power many products in the increasingly competitive AI translation market, including Google Translate and German startup DeepL, a next-gen LLM which claims to outperform Google, Microsoft and ChatpGPT-4 in translation quality.
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Since its founding in 2013, Unbabel has positioned itself as unique in the translation market by combining artificial neural network-based AI with a crowdsourced model. Pedro characterised the company’s origins to CNBC as “very much focused on creating hybrid solutions” because AI was not yet at the point where it could operate independently.
“But I think for the first time, we believe that translation is now fully in the realm of AI capabilities, and that you can do a lot of things without needing humans at all in the case of translation,” he added.
Humans will still have some role, Pedro says, noting that people will still be “responsible for making sure that things get translated and are delivered in the right places.” He is currently seeking US$20-50 million in funding from investors to fuel the growth and development of Widn.
