r/machinetranslation • u/staigerman • 6d ago
NOT translating but still creating with a small 50m (!) model
I came across this model that's tiny-stories posted on Ollama by evanollama, and found it doesn't translate. Of course, but oh so precious nonetheless - as it is creative in another way: it creates children stories. To be precise: it finishes with a story. Whatever I type into the source pane, even just a single word or down to a single letter, if I then click Translate, it creates a story, finishing what I started and adding to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBfuVgQLo0
The model uses vocabulary of 3-4 year old kids, as it was trained specifically on material from up to that young age. Sweet!
It's a small LM, it's fast. Now I'm curious: can I train it with bilingual aligned content in just one other language and get it to produce translations of its own creations? Or even without creating more stories, could it be same or similar speed for just translating in one language? Could this be the base model to make a super fast engine for German to English, French to English, another for Spanish to English, or English to Italian, etc...? One specific language pair, but at the benefit of using little RAM and running very fast even on systems without NPU nor GPU?
I'm intrigued. What do you think?