Where AI Began: A Story of Language, Meaning, and the Origins of Intelligence

Translated’s founder Marco Trombetti and tech journalist Riccardo Luna explore how the story of Translated intersects with the rise of modern artificial intelligence.

In a special episode of the podcast Fly Me to the Moon, journalist Riccardo Luna sits down with Translated’s co-founder and CEO Marco Trombetti to explore the origins of the company and one of the hardest and most fascinating questions in modern AI: is artificial intelligence just a “stochastic parrot”? Or, perhaps, are we the same?

The conversation traces the origins of today’s generative AI: not in chatbots or image models, but in machine translation. “Translation was one of the first real-world challenges that forced machines to understand meaning, ambiguity, and context,” Trombetti explains. “That’s where modern AI was born.”

From there, the discussion opens up to broader questions: what does it mean for an algorithm to “understand”? Can AI ever grasp the emotional and cultural subtleties that define human language?

And if our brains, like large language models, learn through prediction and repetition, where does consciousness truly begin?

The episode also dives into the origins of Translated, a story that began not in a small town just outside Rome. It’s there that founders Marco Trombetti and Isabelle Andrieu made a pact that would shape their lives.

Between reflections on the linguistic singularity, the future of translation, and the ethics of automation, Marco shares the personal philosophy that drives the work of all of us at Translated: technology should amplify humans, not replace them. That belief led us sailing around the world with Translated 9, with limited technology allowed, to prove that the secret behind great ventures are great humans and great human values.