The work is very interesting. The title is misleading. A better title would be: "all of human ingredients compressed into 1,800 primitives" There is little to substantively nothing about the actual cooking: preparation methods, proportions, etc. But the idea that tomato goes well with beef the whole world over is very interesting and useful for creating flavors that will go together, perhaps surprisingly. It will be…
Unless I'm missing something, there's also nothing in the paper to indicate this is "all of human ingredients"? It looks like it's 11 data sources covering a bunch of common cuisines, with the English + Chinese sources accounting for 90% (!) of the dataset. Among others, Africa and the Arab world are not present in the data (good for about 25% of the global population). Also, all non-English terms were AI-translated…
for example, how would you translate "chips" to another language without first knowing which version of English you are translating from? could be an american speaker with a british relative and they use the british definition of chips while otherwise mostly speaking american english.
there's a level of pragmatism in translation that needs to be assumed, and ultimately we have to accept that translated knowledge will always have low resolution. There is a layer of work that needs to be done with the source of the materials involvement to get written content to a level of formalism needed to be representative of the language it is written in. Generally, the work of editors. Which means successful translation for wide distribution, while still not guaranteed, is predicated on the editorial skills of the translator which begs for dialogue with the source.
Meanwhile, AI provides this super convenient band aid to get translation results you can't disprove.
I genuinely think people are severely underestimating the power held by these models for being translators and how literal truth is going to be determined by them deep behind the scenes under the disguise of accessibility. Not in a dangerous way necessarily, just in a way where what languages are and what words mean is going to shift towards whatever the models think they are.
In a way, over extended time, the models will not be wrong about the translations because their results will redefine what successful formal editing of language looks like, and disagreeing with them will amount to the same difference as having local slang.