#31 The World's Biggest Language Model, Kudo Raises 6M for Remote SI, Open Source Machine Interpreting

Florian brings you this week’s language news from his hideaway in the mountains of Switzerland, sharing news on the world’s largest language model, GPT-3, from OpenAI. He and Esther (who is still hunkered down in London) discuss its applications in language generation, and whether or not it’s any good at the task of machine translation yet (spoiler: not really). Esther talks about two funding stories from the week: a USD 1.1m raise from Sweden-based localization and tech provider LocalizeDirect, which has built a headless CMS to support multilingual game development; and multilingual web conferencing platform Kudo, which raised USD 6m from VC based on their remote simultaneous interpreting tech. Leaping from distance interpreting to a machine interpreting, Florian discusses the launch of M.INTerpreting, an open-source project to help further research into machine interpreting, spearheaded by Claudio Fantinuoli from the University of Mainz. Also in the land of open-source, the two talk about Amazon Translate, which has just announced added support for powerpoint files.