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!

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

VectorSpaceModel t1_jdxwb8w wrote on March 28, 2023 at 12:09 AM

#2,404,488

It’s probably chinese

Own_Quality_5321 t1_jdxyzct wrote on March 28, 2023 at 12:28 AM

#2,404,904

Replying to VectorSpaceModel (#2,404,488)

Definitely Chinese. Definitely not French.

ZestyData t1_jdy1uqw wrote on March 28, 2023 at 12:49 AM

#2,405,409

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.

currentscurrents t1_jdy3q2b wrote on March 28, 2023 at 1:03 AM

#2,405,680

Replying to VectorSpaceModel (#2,404,488)

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

Hnriek t1_jdyb8e9 wrote on March 28, 2023 at 2:00 AM

#2,406,862

Replying to ZestyData (#2,405,409)

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

ZestyData t1_jdyfg0y wrote on March 28, 2023 at 2:28 AM

#2,407,402

Replying to Hnriek (#2,406,862)

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.