The Speed of Thought

In  the NY Times Magazine article The Great A.I. Awakening, Gideon Lewis-Kraus relates the tale of the development of the AI implementation of Google Translate. The previous version of Translate, which had been running for 10 years, was based on a symbolic A.I. model. That platform required exhaustive human-managed data sets and rules. By contrast, the new version was built on a machine-learning neural-network platform. Time taken to complete the new system--nine months.

Here's a Japanese translation of Hemingway's The Snows of Kilimanjaro translated back to English as compared with the original:

NO. 1:
Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.  

NO. 2:
Kilimanjaro is a mountain of 19,710 feet covered with snow and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. The summit of the west is called “Ngaje Ngai” in Masai, the house of God. Near the top of the west there is a dry and frozen dead body of leopard. No one has ever explained what leopard wanted at that altitude.

Can you tell which is the Google translation?

Here's  what the translation would have looked like using Translate the day before the switch to the new version:

Kilimanjaro is 19,710 feet of the mountain covered with snow, and it is said that the highest mountain in Africa. Top of the west, “Ngaje Ngai” in the Maasai language, has been referred to as the house of God. The top close to the west, there is a dry, frozen carcass of a leopard. Whether the leopard had what the demand at that altitude, there is no that nobody explained.

 Change is coming - far faster than anyone could have predicted.