alt Hacker NewsLook at it from this lens: translating and transcribing these stories hasn't happened for the centuries they existed, while as you point out the skills where always there. In contrast LLMs have been here for a few years at most and everyone and their dogs are trying to get in on the "race".
With absolutely no insight into why, which one has better odds to happen first is obvious to me.
Sure, it isn't as "hot" to translate stuff as it used to be some hundreds of years ago, and building LLMs surely is "hot" today, I don't doubt more people are attempting to build LLMs today than translating huge datasets, especially if we narrow the two to exclusively "In Norwegian".
Having insights into both translations, transcriptions and attempting to build LLMs myself, I'm fairly sure which effort would be successful first, regardless of how many attempt it first.