AI will outperform humans at translating languages by 2024 (median)
“Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024), writing high-school essays (by 2026), driving a truck (by 2027), working in retail (by 2031), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053).”
Context: Survey of 352 researchers who published at NIPS/ICML 2015, run in 2016 (Grace et al., arXiv 1705.08807, May 2017). Years are aggregate medians (50% chance).
How we judge it
Our interpretation: by end-2024, machine translation matches or beats fluent amateur human translators across major language pairs.
Resolution criteria are our interpretation of the claim, written before grading. Methodology
- Said
- Resolve by
- Verdict
- Correct ()
- Stated probability
- None stated
- Specificity
- 2 of 3 (dated, some interpretation)
- Score
- 1.0 points × weight 2
Evidence & grader’s note
In WMT24's human evaluation (professional annotators), the best systems, led by LLMs such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet, were statistically tied with professional human reference translations in 7 of 11 language pairs and ahead of them in the rest. The survey's bar was a fluent but amateur translator. WMT's own title adds "MT is not solved yet".
Evidence timeline
Dated entries from the claim’s own record (statement, verdict, later developments) and sourced entries added by editors. Each links to its source; none changes the verdict.
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