[D] Is French the most widely used language in ML circles after English? If not, what are some useful (natural) languages in the field of machine learning?

Submitted by Subject_Ad_9680 t3_124604y in MachineLearning

I have recently noticed a lot of French content regarding ML stuffs. I am not sure whether it's just because of Bengio and the stuff coming out of UdeMontreal. But looking at this a bit deeper, I know that Yann Lecun is also a native French speaker. In addition, I recently learned that Hugging Face is a French company, and that DeepMind has only 2 offices in non-Anglophone regions and they are Montreal and Paris.

I don't know if I am just connecting the dots where there aren't really connections but is there actually a significant amount of ML work (either academia or in industry) being done in French?

If not, what are some other natural languages that are widely used in ML? I know English obviously just dominates the whole field and tech sector in general, but I am curious to know what 2nd language might b advantageous and helpful to have in this field. Thank you!

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VectorSpaceModel t1_jdxwb8w wrote

It’s probably chinese

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currentscurrents t1_jdy3q2b wrote

Overwhelming majority of ML research comes out of US and China because that's where the big tech companies are.

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Janderhungrige t1_jdzetzd wrote

Yes, but an interesting fact is that the score of chatGPT4 is higher for French than for Mandarin (83.6% vs 80.1%). With English at the top (85.5%).

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ZestyData t1_jdy1uqw wrote

Now this is a bizarre post..

The answer is clearly Mandarin. By like 2-4 orders of magnitude in terms of ML publishing and the language used internally in ML matters.

French, and indeed any non-English western language, is functionally useless for the explicit purpose of keeping up with industry/research material, or ML-specific career progression.

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Hnriek t1_jdyb8e9 wrote

Obv Mandarin, but aybe only 1 OOM ahead of Japanese? Simply approximating by population size & comaprable level of English skills

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ZestyData t1_jdyfg0y wrote

I wasn't aware of Japan having a particularly disconnected tech sphere from the West like China does. Where China has its own independent platforms, technologies, separate SOTAs and completely disjointed research (until the recent 5 years where they've really started converging and borrowing from each other).

While Japan has tech companies, most of their research is coming out of their global offices, and they really are global even when based in Japan. Sony aren't publishing papers in Japanese, they're doing so to Western conferences in English.

Whereas China had its own parallel FAANG equivalent tech giants developing their own versions of Amazon, Google, and Facebook's tech supremacy & its constituent ML advances.

All this to say that Japan engaged in the Western economy a lot more, and subsequently its tech companies engaged in the Western pool of talent, science, and communication a lot more. Meanwhile China had its own bubble until very very recently, and thus a lot of the world's unique & innovative ML has been conducted in Mandarin.

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Vrulth t1_jdyy8uy wrote

I'm a frenchman and I laugh, thanks !

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Deep-Station-1746 t1_jdz5z9w wrote

Pythonese is quite useful, from what I hear. Especially the Torchese dialect.

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Janderhungrige t1_jdzel3h wrote

Looking at chatGPT4 scores ... laughing in German while looking at French (83.7% vs 83.6%)

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