Google released T5X checkpoints for MADLAD-400 a couple of months ago, but nobody could figure out how to run them. Turns out the vocabulary was wrong, but they uploaded the correct one last week.
I’ve converted the models to the safetensors format, and I created this space if you want to try the smaller model.
I also published quantized GGUF weights you can use with candle. It decodes at ~15tokens/s on a M2 Mac.
It seems that NLLB is the most popular machine translation model right now, but the license only allows non commercial usage. MADLAD-400 is CC BY 4.0.
Meta’s NLLB is supposed to be the best translator model, right? But it’s for non-commercial use only. How does MADLAD compare to NLLB?
NLLB has horrible performance, I’ve done extensive testing with it and wouldn’t even translate a children’s book with it. Google Translator does a much better job and that’s saying something. lol
The MADLAD-400 paper has a bunch of comparisons with NLLB. MADLAD beats NLLB in some benchmarks, it’s quite close in others, and it loses some. But the largest MADLAD is 5x smaller than the original NLLB. It also supports more 2x more languages.