Wow, there's a lot of cynicism in this thread, even for HN.
Regardless of whether or not it works perfectly, surely we can all relate to the childhood desire to 'speak' to animals at one point or another?
You can call it a waste of resources or someones desperate attempt at keeping their job if you want, but these are marine biologists. I imagine cross species communication would be a major achievement and seems like a worthwhile endeavor to me.
I'm as or more cynical than the next guy - but it seems to me that being able to communicate with animals has high utility for humans. Partly from an emotional or companionship perspective as we've been doing with dogs for a long time, but maybe even on purely utilitarian grounds.
If we want to know something about what's going on in the ocean, or high on a mountain or in the sky or whatever - what if we can just ask some animals about it? What about for things that animals can naturally perceive that humans have trouble with - certain wavelengths of light or magnetic fields for example? How about being able to recruit animals to do specific tasks that they are better suited for? Seems like a win for us, and maybe a win for them as well.
Not sure what else, but history suggests that the more people have been able to communicate with each other, the better the outcomes. I assume this holds true more broadly as well.
I was just reading how fishing industry’s longlines have caught many dolphins and other bycatches. It would be great to be able to give them warnings, or even better, to ask them to keep other big animals away from the longlines.
I know this comment is totally innocent but it does kind of bum me out to be at a point in time where instead of addressing our impact on the environment directly, we're trying to make computers that can talk to dolphins so we can tell them to stay out of the way lol
You don't tend to hear about it and not that there isn't still progress to be made, but there has been tonnes of progress on fisheries interactions with protected bycatch species. For ex the infamous dolphin problem in the eastern tropical Pacific purse seine tuna fishery is down 99.8% from its peak to the point populations are recovering, despite the fishery intentionally setting on dolphin schools to catch > 150,000 t of yellowfin tuna per year.
Pelagic gillnets are probably the gear that still have the most issues with dolphin bycatch, and acoustic pingers that play a loud ultrasonic tone when they detect an echolocation click are already used to reduce interactions in some fisheries.
One of the things I think is amazing is that people will say “here’s a way to make the world better” and others will react with “it’s so sad that you propose making the world better instead of making it perfect”. I think it’s great.
Or, like, we could stop ravaging the oceans by industrial fishing, stop pretending magical technology will save the day, and try to limit our resource consumption to sustainable levels?
Humanity’s relationship with animals is so schizophrenic. On the one hand, let’s try to learn how to talk to cute dolphins and chat with them what it’s like to swim!, and on the other, well yeah that steak on my table may have once lead a subjective experience before it was slaughtered, and mass-farming it wrecks the ecosystem I depend on to live, but gosh it’s so tasty, I can’t give that up!
Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
At the same time, I want to be as humane as practical; I don’t want to cause needless suffering to any creature. If I kill a bug, I don’t want it to suffer. Same with food animals.
The more like me an animal is, the less I want to eat it.
There are a lot of humans. Any action to forcefully reduce the number of humans or to forcefully reduce birth rates is almost certainly way more morally abhorrent to me, than doing what is necessary to feed those humans.
> Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
This is akin to saying ''humans are violent, so i am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to commit violence''.
So just be honest: you WANT to eat meat because you like it, consequences be damned.
And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.
> And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.
This myth needs to die. Two thirds of all farmland on this planet is pasture [1] that isn’t fertile enough to grow food for humans except by raising animals on it. If we were to switch to a plant based diet, the vast majority of our farmland as a civilization becomes unusable. Most of the world uses animals to generate calories from unproductive land, first via dairy and then slaughtering the animals for food.
Not to mention, animals have been crucial sources of sustainable fertilizer for many thousands of years, without which agriculture would never have been as productive.
Do you also have this negative attitude towards all other non-vegitarian animals, or is it just for humans since they have more capability to cause more ecological harm?
Most importantly, humans have the ability to reflect their actions and decide differently. Both to minimize suffering, and to keep the plant hospitable to humans.
What’s gross is the idea that plants are “lower” and thus less deserving of value to life. Either embrace radically life denying Jainism, anti-natalism, voluntary extinction movement, and benevolent world exploder theory - or admit that you are just as cruel as those you implicitly claim to be better than (as a presumably non gross person)
But white vegans aren’t prepared to actually reckon with the logical conclusion of their ideas. Go read David Benatar (he’s a vegan whose actually consistent btw)
Specifically, this gave me the reaction, bc it seems in bad company with other ideologies:
> I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
Deep history exists in our "biological" context and is critical reality, but arguing some "biological imperative" to act on it, that strikes me as a strange place to start
Context: am biochemist, and I think about biology and biochemistry as a very integrated part of my worldview. But I don't harken to any biological imperative for my actions and choices. It explains them, it doesn't command them. Distorting our biology and psychology is what makes us human and agentic imho
I never understood that line of reasoning. Plants do not have a central nervous system and, as of the current scientific consensus, are not aware of their subjective experience like animals are. Humans are omnivores, capable of thriving on a plant-based diet. The logical consequence, if you try to minimise suffering, is to eat plants instead of animals.
Life is a game of shifting carbon. To stay alive, you need to kill. But you can try to limit that to the least amount of killing required, and to killing those life forms without sentience as we understand it. This is the foundation of any ethical reasoning.
Having said all that, I also reject the vertical ordering of life on the tree of evolution. Plants are just very different from us, not necessarily higher or lower. Considering we have to make a choice as to what we are ready to sacrifice to survive, we can still choose those life forms that likely are not capable of suffering like we do, before turning to those more similar to us.
I am all for the Disney utopian fantasy of us living with animals.
However if universal communication was to be made. Don't you think that animals are going to be pretty pissed to discover what we have done with their kingdom?
"Hi Mr Dolphin, how's the sea today?" "Wet and a plastic bottle cap got lodged in my blowhole last night..."
There's an Apple TV+ series called Extrapolations with a plot of a dystopian future heavily affected by climate change. One of the plotlines involve humans successfully developing the technology to communicate with humpback whales.
So, the story involves an animal DNA archivist interacting with what's presented as the last living humpback whale, focusing on its isolation etc. It turns out the research lab's goal is to trick the whale by faking mating signals, aiming to get it to reveal information about whale history and culture. It's essentially data mining the animal.
I'm not suggesting a Disney utopian fantasy. I'm just suggesting that in a very pragmatic way, we can ask them questions and get meaningful answers, or ask them to do things for us.
What's going on down the the sea over there?
Would you mind pulling that thing from here to there?
Or whatever - I don't know what we'll figure out to do, but certainly something.
As far as them being mad at us, I doubt they will be, but I'd be interested to get their perspective - if they have one.
I do not believe we can expect anything resembling a human level of intelligence to be discovered.
I think you're overestimating the dolphins here. Even humans have trouble not placing collective blame on groups of people they don't know well - it even has a name in social psychology, the "out-group homogeneity effect". Just think about opposing political groups or international relations.
So you think you’re not responsible for the fucked-up oceans because you let other people throw your trash into the sea for you, and the organically farmed salmon you eat surely wasn’t produced under atrocious conditions?
"virtue signalling" really is one of those words/turns of phrase that needs to be put on a high shelf.
Plenty of people genuinely dislike the concentration of economic and computing power that big tech represents. Them expressing this is not "virtue signaling", it is an authentic moral position they hold.
Plenty of people genuinely dislike the disregard for labor and intellectual property rights that anything Gen AI represents. Again, an authentic moral position.
"Virtue signaling" is for example, when a corporate entity doesn't authentically support diversity through any kind of consequential action but does make sure to sponsor the local pride event (in exchange for their logo being everywhere) and swaps their social media logos to rainbow versions.
I believe it meets the definition of virtue signaling to express a position you don’t do anything to advocate - which is the vast majority of opinions expressed on the Internet. It can be a sincerely held belief but if you’re not taking action around it I don’t see any difference from the corporate example you gave.
What’s inherently wrong with virtue signaling though? I’m signaling virtues of thoughtfulness and careful, reasoned, intellectual debate. What virtues do you think you’re signaling about yourself?
Well since we’re in a thread about talking to dolphins:
The problem with virtue signaling is that it’s parroting virtue for social praise. This parrot-like, repeater-node behavior often attempts to move the conversation to virtue talking points and away from the specific topic.
To be clear, this is just about online virtue signaling. It’s just as silly in the physical world - certain attire, gestures, tribal obedience, etc.
To call something “virtue-signaling” implies the primary motivation of the behavior is to associate characteristics with oneself. There is a problem with virtue signaling in a discussion if the purpose of the discussion is to evaluate ideas in an abstract space —- the discussion then ceases to be in good faith.
Moreover, if all statements made in such a context needed to be acted out in someway, that would negate the whole purpose of the abstract space.
The purpose of my rhetoric in this thread has been to illustrate the issues with your definition rather than to say something about myself.
I suspect that the people that dislike supporting Google probably don’t support Google. I imagine that the people who dislike supporting generative AI do not support or use it? Why are you assuming they are hypocrites?
> Plenty of people genuinely dislike the concentration of economic and computing power that big tech represents.
The harder question that of risk management between the computing power we like on the one hand and its tendency to enable both megalomaniacs at the high end, and the unspeakable depravity of child pornography at the low.
I don’t remember saying I agree with these positions. I am actually opposed to the idea of making policy decisions based on moral values rather than consequentialist ethics, so I disagree with both.
Calling something "trendy" is a great way to try to dismiss it without actually providing any counterargument. The deep suspicion of anything Google does is extremely well justified IMHO.
Terrible analogy. This is not sponsoring but research. Google didn’t just give money in exchange for publicity. Google has traditionally invested in fundamental research that isn't commercially potential, at least in the short term.
If a tobacco company invested in lung cancer research that resulted in some treatment breakthroughs, that research should be celebrated, while their main business should continue to be condemned.
This is closer to being upset at any and all innovations done by an American because the USA does some terrible things. Not all parts of Google are directly tainted by ads and the people on these teams genuinely think they are working on important problems that help advance humanity. I don't think they are wrong to feel that way.
Google is where great technology and innovation goes to die.
Please give me one example in the last decade where meta or Google research has led to actual products or open-sourced technologies, and not just expensive proprietary experiments shelved after billions were spent on them?
Regardless of your or my feelings on this specific topic, "virtue signalling" is good because virtue is good and signalling to others that we ought to be good is also good. The use of that term as a pejorative is itself toxic cynicism
It's not even about the communication! Just having more insight into the brains and communication of other mammals has a ton of scientific value in its own right.
Sometimes it's good just to know things. If we needed to find a practical justification for everything before we started exploring it, we'd still be animals.
I for one am simply happy to see us trying to apply LLMs to something other than replacing call centers... humankind SHOULD be exploring and learning sometimes even when there isn't an ROI.
Don’t understand the cynicism either. Is this not way cooler than the latest pre-revenue series F marketing copy slop bot startup?
To me this task looks less like next token prediction language modeling and more like translating a single “word” at a time into English. It’s a pretty tractable problem. The harder parts probably come from all the messiness of hearing and playing sounds underwater.
I would imagine adapting to new vocab would be pretty clunky in an LLM based system. It would be interesting if it were able to add new words in real time.
Ah this is different. The Nytimes article is about identifying/classifying dolphins from audio. This new model is about communicating with dolphins from generated audio.
The difference between recognizing someone from hearing them, and actually talking to them!
Gemini supposedly allows for conversational speech w/your data. Have you tried it? We have; it's laughably bad and can't get the most basic stuff right from a well-crafted datamart.
If it can't do the most basic stuff, please explain to be how in the fuck it is going to understand dolphin language and why would should believe its results anyway?
They have sufficient control over their model that they can presumably tailor it to their needs. Perhaps if you acquired analogous control, you’d have more success.
I work at Google on the Gemma team, and while not on the core team for this model, participated a bit on this project.
I personally was happy to see this project get built. The dolphin researchers have been doing great science for years, from the computational/mathematics side it was quite neat see how that was combined with the Gemma models.
It's great that dolphins are getting audio decoders in language models first, does the Gemma team intend to roll that out for human speech at some point eventually too?
Not directly related, but one of those stories that is so bizarre you almost can't believe it isn't made up.
There was a NASA funded attempt to communicate with Dolphins. This eccentric scientist created a house that was half water (a series of connected pools) and half dry spaces. A woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt lived full-time with the Dolphins attempting to learn a shared language between them.
Things went completely off the rails in many, many ways. The lead scientist became obsessed with LSD and built an isolation chamber above the house. This was like the sensory deprivation tanks you get now (often called float tanks). He would take LSD and place himself in the tank and believed he was psychically communicating with the Dolphins.
>A woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt lived full-time with the Dolphins attempting to learn a shared language between them.
She also had sex with a male dolphin called Peter.
>He would take LSD and place himself in the tank and believed he was psychically communicating with the Dolphins.
He eventually came to believe he was communicating with a cosmic entity called ECCO (Earth Coincidence Control Office). The story of the Sega game "Ecco the Dolphin" [1] is a tongue-in-cheek reference to this. I recommend watching the Atrocity Guide episode on John C. Lily and his dolphin "science" [2]. It's on par with The Men Who Stare at Goats (the non-fiction book [3], not the movie).
It's funny you were thinking that, because I was thinking, "how would you teach a japanese man english?." The obvious answer is to jerk him off and give him high doses of LSD first. I immediately came to the same conclusion with this AI-dolphin stuff. Have they tried jerking off the dolphin and giving it LSD first? Apparently - yes.
Tangential, but this brings up a really interesting question for me.
LLMs are multi-lingual without really trying assuming the languages in question are sufficiently well-represented in their training corpus.
I presume their ability to translate comes from the fact that there are lots of human-translated passages in their corpus; the same work in multiple languages, which lets them figure out the necessary mappings between semantic points (words.)
But I wonder about the translation capability of a model trained on multiple languages but with completely disjoint documents (no documents that were translations of another, no dictionaries, etc).
Could the emerging latent "concept space" of two completely different human languages be similar enough that the model could translate well, even without ever seeing examples of how a multilingual human would do a translation?
I don't have a strong intuition here but it seems plausible. And if so, that's remarkable because that's basically a science-fiction babelfish or universal translator.
Check out this recent benchmark MTOB (Machine Translation from One Book) -- relevant to your comment, though the book does have parallel passages so not exactly what you have in mind: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.16575
In the case of non-human communication, I know there has been some fairly well-motivated theorizing about the semantics of individual whale vocalizations. You could imagine a first pass at something like this if the meaning of (say) a couple dozen vocalizations could be characterized with a reasonable degree of confidence.
Super interesting domain that's ripe for some fresh perspectives imo. Feels like at this stage, all people can really do is throw stuff at the wall. The interesting part will begin when someone can get something to stick!
> that's basically a science-fiction babelfish or universal translator
Ten years ago I would have laughed at this notion, but today it doesn't feel that crazy.
I'd conjecture that over the next ten years, this general line of research will yield some non-obvious insights into the structure of non-human communication systems.
Increasingly feels like the sci-fi era has begun -- what a time to be alive.
>lots of human-translated passages in their corpus
Yes. I remember reading that the EU parliamentary proceedings in particular are used to train machine translation models. Unfortunately, I cant remember where I read that. I did find the dataset: https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/europarl
Languages encode similar human experiences, so their conceptual spaces probably have natural alignments even without translation examples. Words for common objects or emotions might cluster similarly.
But without seeing actual translations, a model would miss nuances, idioms, and how languages carve up meaning differently. It might grasp that "dog" and "perro" relate to similar concepts without knowing they're direct translations.
To agree and extend, that's actually how human language works too. The cultural connotations of "dog" in english might be quite different from "perro".
And it gets even more complex because the connotations of "dog" in the USA in 2025 are unquestionably different from "dog" in England in 1599. I can only assume these distinctions also hold across languages. They're not a direct translation.
Let alone extreme cultural specificities... To follow the same example, how would one define "doge" now?
This sounds very cool at a conceptual level, but the article left me in the dark about what they're actually doing with DolphinGemma. The closest to an answer is:
>By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins' natural communication — a task previously requiring immense human effort.
But this doesn't really tell me anything. What does it mean to "help researchers uncover" this stuff? What is the model actually doing?
As far as I can tell, it hasn't actually done anything yet.
The article reads like the press releases you see from academic departments, where an earth shattering breakthrough is juuuuust around the corner. In every single department, of every single university.
Cool to see the use of consumer phones as part of the setup. Having a suite of powerful sensors, processing, display, and battery in a single, compact, sealed package must be immensely useful for science.
The bad outcome is the "AI" will translate our hellos as an insult, the dolphins will drop the masquerade, reveal themselves as our superiors and pound us into dust once and forever.
Picture the last surviving human surrounded by dolphins floating in the air with frickin laser beams coming out of their heads... all angrily asking "why did you say that about our mother?".
And in the background, ChatGPT is saying "I apologize if my previous response was not helpful".
This crowd seems to be cross pollinated with the sci-fi / space exploration set. Communication with cetaceans seems like such an obvious springboard for developing frameworks and techniques for first contact with E.T. /If/ you believe they're out there... And if not, what an incredible opportunity in its own right.
But, since context is so important to communication, I think this would be easier to accomplish with carefully built experiments with captive dolphin populations first. Beginning with wild dolphins is like dropping a guy from New York City into rural Mongolia and hoping he'll learn the language.
Can a powerful model become a fantastic autocomplete for dolphins ? Sure. Someday soon that's very likely to happen. But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means.
To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree.
It would help if the dolphins are also interested in teaching us. Dolphins or we could say to the other '... that is how we pronounce sea-cucumber'. Shared nouns would be the easiest.
The next level, a far harder level, would be to reach the stage where we can say 'the emotion that you are feeling now, that we call "anger"'.
We will no quite have the right word for "anxiety that I feel when my baby's blood flow doesn't sound right in Doppler".
Teaching or learning 'ennui' and 'schadenfreude' would be a whole lot harder.
This begs a question can one fully feel and understand an emotion we do not have a word for ? Perhaps Wittgenstein has an answer.
Postscript: I seem to have triggered quite a few of you and that has me surprised. I thought this would be neither controversial nor unpopular. It's ironic in a way. If we can't understand each other, understanding dolphin "speech" would be a tough hill to climb.
The fact that you cannot wrap your head around something doesn't mean that it's not possible. I do not claim that it is surely possible nor that it isn't. But it sure as hell looks possible.
You also probably don't have kids.
For example: how do you teach a child to speak? Or someone a new language? You show them some objects and their pronunciation. The same with the seagrass and/or a scarf. That's one way. Dolphins can also see (divers with) some objects and name them. We can also guess what they are saying from the sounds plus the actions they do. That's probably how we got "seagrass" in the first place.
For all the word that they don't have in their language, we/they can invent them. Just like we do all the time: artificial intelligence, social network, skyscraper, surfboard, tuxedo, black hole, whatever...
It might also be possible that dolphins' language uses the same patterns as our language(s) and that an LLM that knows both can manage to translate between the two.
I suggest a bit more optimistic look on the world, especially on something that's pretty-much impossible to have any negative consequences for humanity.
Calm down. No need to be rude and condescending and throw personal insults.
If you had read this part --
"But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means.
To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree."
it ought to have been clear that what I am arguing is a corpus of dolphin communication fed to an LLM alone will not suffice. A lot of investments have to be made in this part -- To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds.
I am sure both you and me would be very happy the day we can have some conversation with dolphins.
That's exactly the argument here. You do not think this is possible. I think it _might be_.
You believe we cannot understand their language because we don't have "shared experiences" (etc). I believe we can. That's the disagreement.
AI can learn/predict/invent new things. It already is inventing new materials, new protein structures, etc. We don't need to understand the exact mechanism 100% for it to be able to do it. Let's give it a shot.
There are tons of shared experiences and shared emotions. It's not like there's some hidden organism that we discovered are making noise from within the dark matter. These are animals in the oceans. Plenty of shared experiences and emotions. Dolphins have feelings. Anyway... let's agree to disagree. I fully support this project and am optimistic about its outcomes.
I believe just throwing a corpus of dolphin-dolphin vocalizations at an LLM will fall very short.
I quote myself again -- 'But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means".
Note the emphasis on the word alone.
What needs to happen is to build shared experiences, perhaps with a pod and incorporate that into the ML training process. If this succeeds this exercise of building shared experience will do heavier lifting than the LLM.
Had you spent less effort in coming up with insults and used the leftover processing bandwidth to understand my position it would have made for a nicer exchange. For restoring civility to our conversation I indeed do not hold high hopes.
I suspect the experience of being a dolphin is stranger and more alien than we will ever know. This is a creature that employs its sense of sonar as part of how it understands the world, and has evolved with that sense. It will have concepts related to sonar and echolocation that we cannot grasp. We might be able to map a clumsy understanding of them, e.g. a dolphin cannot smell, it might be able to understand "my nose can taste the air", but is that the same? At least in humans with sensory deficiencies, there are parts of the brain that have evolved alongside the same senses that an unimpaired person has.
Maybe we could finagle an interspecies pidgin, but I wouldn't be surprised if we just fool ourselves for a while before we realize that dolphin language is just different. Even the word language brings along a set of rules and concepts that are almost certainly uniquely human.
I think you are describing more of an edge case than you might think for a vertebrate, mammal, social, warm blooded, air breathing, earth living, pack hunter.
>To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds
Why? With modern AI there exists unsupervised learning for translation where you don't have to explicitly make translation pairs between the 2 languages. It seems possible to eventually create a way to translate without having to have a teaching process for individual words like you describe.
The word is just a 'pointer' to the underlying shared experience, so I don't think you could; the kid would come away thinking red is the same thing as the feeling of splinters or the warmth of a sunset, which isn't what red is, those are just feelings maybe associated with red. That said - I'm actually pretty confident we'll be able to have basic "conversations" made of basic snippets of information with dolphins and whales in my lifetime. Maybe not complex grammatical structure we identify with, but small stuff like: "I'm hungry". I'm not sure if dolphins could understand "fish or octopus for dinner?", because they might not have any idea of a logical 'OR', and perhaps they might don't even differentiate between fish/octopus.
We do share (presumably) experiences of hunger, pain, happiness, the perception of gradations of light and shape/form within them, some kind of dimensionally bound spatial medium they exist in as an individual and are moving through - though of course they might not conceive of these as "dimensions" or "space", they would surely have analogs for directional words - although given they aren't constrained to live on top of a 2D surface, these might not be "up", "down", "left", "right", but something in the vein of "lightward" or "darkward" as the two main directions, and then some complicated 3D rotational coordinate system for modeling direction. Who knows, maybe they even use quaternions!
For the subset of shared experiences and emotions this should be possible, not only that, I feel that we must try (as in, it's a moral/ ethical obligation).
Training an ML on dialogues alone will not be enough. One would need to spend a lot of time to build up a wealth of shared experiences, so that one can learn the mapping/correspondence.
That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics.
Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience.
It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it.
It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning.
Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger.
There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.
I'm not sure what you are trying to argue. That it's impossible to translate between blind and sighted people because they don't "truley" experience color? That's clearly not the case. Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.
> Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.
Of course. That's a no-brainer that different human languages have come up with names for experiences they share.
The hard part is learning the correspondence between say two nouns in different languages that mean the same thing.
Its perfectly possible for an unsupervised ML to use the French word 'rouge' in a French sentence but the notion that 'rouge' corresponds to 'red' in English has to come from some shared grounded experience/emotion.
The French word x word relationship graph has to get connected to the English word x word relationship graph.
BTW for people born deaf and blind it's an enormous challenge just to get to the point where the person understand that things have names. For example for Hellen Keller, it was a very non-trivial event when it finally clicked that the wet sensation she was feeling had a correspondence with what her teacher was writing on her arm. They were lucky that wet was an experience that was common between her and her teacher, lucky that Hellen Keller could experience wetness. Someone or something has to play the same role for dolphins and us. Just a corpus will not suffice.
The experiment design sounds pretty cool. I hope they see some cool results. It would be very cool if humans could talk to another intelligent creature here on earth. This is certainly a step on the way there.
I wonder what's the status quo on the non-LLM side; are we able to manually decode sound patterns to recognize dolphin's communication to some degree? If that's the case, I guess this may have a chance.
The article says that they've only just begun deploying it, and that it will merely be used to speed up the process of recognizing patterns.
> WDP is beginning to deploy DolphinGemma this field season with immediate potential benefits. By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins' natural communication — a task previously requiring immense human effort. Eventually, these patterns, augmented with synthetic sounds created by the researchers to refer to objects with which the dolphins like to play, may establish a shared vocabulary with the dolphins for interactive communication.
My secret wish is that once they decode the language, they hear the dolphin say to themselves: look, it's again those idiot humans trying to bother us, why can't they just live happily like we do?
They’ve been working on decoding dolphin sounds for a long time - Thad was telling me about this project in 2015 and it had been ongoing for a while. One challenge is doing this realtime is extremely difficult because of the frequency the dolphin speech occurs in. And they want to do this realtime which adds to the difficulty level. The other challenge on the AI side is that traditional AI is done using supervised learning whereas dolphin speech would require unsupervised learning. It would be interesting to learn more about how Gemma is helping here.
I'm not saying this is the case here, but every time I've been in internal or promotional videos related to my work, I've been performing for a camera. I'm not playing a theater character, but it's also not what you'd get if you dropped by my desk and asked me the same questions. Calling it acting might seem strong. But it's not not acting. So it's acting.
Does the general principle "we're always performing, in a particular costume, for our audience" help confirm the excited marine biologist desperately wanted to keep their job in spite of a "nothing that's not AI" mandate, so they made up some bullshit?
Separately, could invoking it anytime someone appears excited be described as distrustful of human sincerity or integrity?
After working through these exercises, my answers are no/yes, which leaves me having to agree its clearly cynical. (because "define:cynical" returns "distrustful of human sincerity or integrity")
Wow, there's a lot of cynicism in this thread, even for HN.
Regardless of whether or not it works perfectly, surely we can all relate to the childhood desire to 'speak' to animals at one point or another?
You can call it a waste of resources or someones desperate attempt at keeping their job if you want, but these are marine biologists. I imagine cross species communication would be a major achievement and seems like a worthwhile endeavor to me.
I'm as or more cynical than the next guy - but it seems to me that being able to communicate with animals has high utility for humans. Partly from an emotional or companionship perspective as we've been doing with dogs for a long time, but maybe even on purely utilitarian grounds.
If we want to know something about what's going on in the ocean, or high on a mountain or in the sky or whatever - what if we can just ask some animals about it? What about for things that animals can naturally perceive that humans have trouble with - certain wavelengths of light or magnetic fields for example? How about being able to recruit animals to do specific tasks that they are better suited for? Seems like a win for us, and maybe a win for them as well.
Not sure what else, but history suggests that the more people have been able to communicate with each other, the better the outcomes. I assume this holds true more broadly as well.
I was just reading how fishing industry’s longlines have caught many dolphins and other bycatches. It would be great to be able to give them warnings, or even better, to ask them to keep other big animals away from the longlines.
I know this comment is totally innocent but it does kind of bum me out to be at a point in time where instead of addressing our impact on the environment directly, we're trying to make computers that can talk to dolphins so we can tell them to stay out of the way lol
You don't tend to hear about it and not that there isn't still progress to be made, but there has been tonnes of progress on fisheries interactions with protected bycatch species. For ex the infamous dolphin problem in the eastern tropical Pacific purse seine tuna fishery is down 99.8% from its peak to the point populations are recovering, despite the fishery intentionally setting on dolphin schools to catch > 150,000 t of yellowfin tuna per year.
Pelagic gillnets are probably the gear that still have the most issues with dolphin bycatch, and acoustic pingers that play a loud ultrasonic tone when they detect an echolocation click are already used to reduce interactions in some fisheries.
One of the things I think is amazing is that people will say “here’s a way to make the world better” and others will react with “it’s so sad that you propose making the world better instead of making it perfect”. I think it’s great.
Or, like, we could stop ravaging the oceans by industrial fishing, stop pretending magical technology will save the day, and try to limit our resource consumption to sustainable levels?
Humanity’s relationship with animals is so schizophrenic. On the one hand, let’s try to learn how to talk to cute dolphins and chat with them what it’s like to swim!, and on the other, well yeah that steak on my table may have once lead a subjective experience before it was slaughtered, and mass-farming it wrecks the ecosystem I depend on to live, but gosh it’s so tasty, I can’t give that up!
Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
At the same time, I want to be as humane as practical; I don’t want to cause needless suffering to any creature. If I kill a bug, I don’t want it to suffer. Same with food animals.
The more like me an animal is, the less I want to eat it.
There are a lot of humans. Any action to forcefully reduce the number of humans or to forcefully reduce birth rates is almost certainly way more morally abhorrent to me, than doing what is necessary to feed those humans.
> Humans are omnivores. I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
This is akin to saying ''humans are violent, so i am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to commit violence''.
So just be honest: you WANT to eat meat because you like it, consequences be damned.
And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.
> And of course if you truly want to feed as many humans as possible the only solution is vegetarianism or even veganism. Meat is just way too wasteful to be a decent solution.
This myth needs to die. Two thirds of all farmland on this planet is pasture [1] that isn’t fertile enough to grow food for humans except by raising animals on it. If we were to switch to a plant based diet, the vast majority of our farmland as a civilization becomes unusable. Most of the world uses animals to generate calories from unproductive land, first via dairy and then slaughtering the animals for food.
Not to mention, animals have been crucial sources of sustainable fertilizer for many thousands of years, without which agriculture would never have been as productive.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
Do you also have this negative attitude towards all other non-vegitarian animals, or is it just for humans since they have more capability to cause more ecological harm?
Most importantly, humans have the ability to reflect their actions and decide differently. Both to minimize suffering, and to keep the plant hospitable to humans.
Really? You cannot fathom an animal population that has exceeded it's ecosystem's capacity and has no predators so needs to be culled?
Doesn't happen.
That situation always auto-corrects as resource availability shifts.
What does happen is humans find things like mice / locust / kangaroo plagues inconvenient, so we decide to intervene.
It's not like lions get tired of all those pesky gazelle getting up in their grillz and find the need to get about in helicopters thinning the herd.
Gross.
What’s gross is the idea that plants are “lower” and thus less deserving of value to life. Either embrace radically life denying Jainism, anti-natalism, voluntary extinction movement, and benevolent world exploder theory - or admit that you are just as cruel as those you implicitly claim to be better than (as a presumably non gross person)
But white vegans aren’t prepared to actually reckon with the logical conclusion of their ideas. Go read David Benatar (he’s a vegan whose actually consistent btw)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Never_to_Have_Been
Specifically, this gave me the reaction, bc it seems in bad company with other ideologies:
> I am unapologetic about obeying biological imperatives to eat other animals.
Deep history exists in our "biological" context and is critical reality, but arguing some "biological imperative" to act on it, that strikes me as a strange place to start
Context: am biochemist, and I think about biology and biochemistry as a very integrated part of my worldview. But I don't harken to any biological imperative for my actions and choices. It explains them, it doesn't command them. Distorting our biology and psychology is what makes us human and agentic imho
I never understood that line of reasoning. Plants do not have a central nervous system and, as of the current scientific consensus, are not aware of their subjective experience like animals are. Humans are omnivores, capable of thriving on a plant-based diet. The logical consequence, if you try to minimise suffering, is to eat plants instead of animals.
Life is a game of shifting carbon. To stay alive, you need to kill. But you can try to limit that to the least amount of killing required, and to killing those life forms without sentience as we understand it. This is the foundation of any ethical reasoning.
Having said all that, I also reject the vertical ordering of life on the tree of evolution. Plants are just very different from us, not necessarily higher or lower. Considering we have to make a choice as to what we are ready to sacrifice to survive, we can still choose those life forms that likely are not capable of suffering like we do, before turning to those more similar to us.
How are plants not lower on an evolution scale than say, mammals? They are less complex biologically and less capable of affecting their environment.
Surely some debate to be had here. Plants absolutely affect their environments, just over longer timescales.
Why? GP's arguments seem pretty reasonable and tame. What are yours?
Sorry, I was admittedly lazy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43722576
>we could stop ravaging the oceans by industrial fishing
To do this likely would require large-scale war.
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I suppose this isn’t exactly what you were getting at, but now I can’t help but wonder exactly how delicious a dolphin is.
Dear Mr Dolphin, can you please tell the large sharks to not go that way?
- No, f... the sharks!
Or, you know, don’t fish at all so we don’t kill possibly trillions of sentient fish every year for no necessary reason whatsoever?
Side bonus, we also don’t kill the highly sentient and highly intelligent creatures you’re concerned about.
3 billion people get at least 20% of their protein from fish, and roughly 500 million rely on fishing for a pay check.[1]
Those people can all just starve, and you're fine with that?
1. https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/will-there-be-enough-f...
I am all for the Disney utopian fantasy of us living with animals.
However if universal communication was to be made. Don't you think that animals are going to be pretty pissed to discover what we have done with their kingdom?
"Hi Mr Dolphin, how's the sea today?" "Wet and a plastic bottle cap got lodged in my blowhole last night..."
There's an Apple TV+ series called Extrapolations with a plot of a dystopian future heavily affected by climate change. One of the plotlines involve humans successfully developing the technology to communicate with humpback whales.
So, the story involves an animal DNA archivist interacting with what's presented as the last living humpback whale, focusing on its isolation etc. It turns out the research lab's goal is to trick the whale by faking mating signals, aiming to get it to reveal information about whale history and culture. It's essentially data mining the animal.
I'm not suggesting a Disney utopian fantasy. I'm just suggesting that in a very pragmatic way, we can ask them questions and get meaningful answers, or ask them to do things for us.
What's going on down the the sea over there? Would you mind pulling that thing from here to there?
Or whatever - I don't know what we'll figure out to do, but certainly something.
As far as them being mad at us, I doubt they will be, but I'd be interested to get their perspective - if they have one.
I do not believe we can expect anything resembling a human level of intelligence to be discovered.
Or do you mind going over there and planting this round thing to the side of the ship belonging to the other humans?
I suspect Dolphins can tell people apart and will recognize you as not the guy that threw the bottle cap akin to all those stories about crows.
Certainly will be interesting to see how much we can bribe Dolphins to do once we have faster communication methods.
I think you're overestimating the dolphins here. Even humans have trouble not placing collective blame on groups of people they don't know well - it even has a name in social psychology, the "out-group homogeneity effect". Just think about opposing political groups or international relations.
So you think you’re not responsible for the fucked-up oceans because you let other people throw your trash into the sea for you, and the organically farmed salmon you eat surely wasn’t produced under atrocious conditions?
Embrace antinatalism and life denial or embrace amor fati. Sitting on the sidelines like so many others do on this topic is intellectually bankrupt.
Eh, collective punishment is the fallacy.
These problems are generally industrial in nature so it's very knowable as to where a large source of pollution comes from.
There just isn't a political will to actually enforce laws.
It's trendy to hate Google, and even more trendy to hate anything AI.
The cynicism on display here is little more than virtue signalling and/or upvote farming.
Sad to see such thoughtless behaviour has reached even this bastion of reason.
"virtue signalling" really is one of those words/turns of phrase that needs to be put on a high shelf.
Plenty of people genuinely dislike the concentration of economic and computing power that big tech represents. Them expressing this is not "virtue signaling", it is an authentic moral position they hold.
Plenty of people genuinely dislike the disregard for labor and intellectual property rights that anything Gen AI represents. Again, an authentic moral position.
"Virtue signaling" is for example, when a corporate entity doesn't authentically support diversity through any kind of consequential action but does make sure to sponsor the local pride event (in exchange for their logo being everywhere) and swaps their social media logos to rainbow versions.
I believe it meets the definition of virtue signaling to express a position you don’t do anything to advocate - which is the vast majority of opinions expressed on the Internet. It can be a sincerely held belief but if you’re not taking action around it I don’t see any difference from the corporate example you gave.
Your statement is virtue signaling according to its own definition unless you've taken action to prevent people complaining about Google.
Did I say anything about people complaining about Google? I think you misread or misinterpreted what I wrote.
You haven’t taken actions against me misinterpreting things. Why do you keep virtue signaling?
What’s inherently wrong with virtue signaling though? I’m signaling virtues of thoughtfulness and careful, reasoned, intellectual debate. What virtues do you think you’re signaling about yourself?
Well since we’re in a thread about talking to dolphins:
The problem with virtue signaling is that it’s parroting virtue for social praise. This parrot-like, repeater-node behavior often attempts to move the conversation to virtue talking points and away from the specific topic.
To be clear, this is just about online virtue signaling. It’s just as silly in the physical world - certain attire, gestures, tribal obedience, etc.
To call something “virtue-signaling” implies the primary motivation of the behavior is to associate characteristics with oneself. There is a problem with virtue signaling in a discussion if the purpose of the discussion is to evaluate ideas in an abstract space —- the discussion then ceases to be in good faith.
Moreover, if all statements made in such a context needed to be acted out in someway, that would negate the whole purpose of the abstract space.
The purpose of my rhetoric in this thread has been to illustrate the issues with your definition rather than to say something about myself.
I suspect that the people that dislike supporting Google probably don’t support Google. I imagine that the people who dislike supporting generative AI do not support or use it? Why are you assuming they are hypocrites?
> Plenty of people genuinely dislike the concentration of economic and computing power that big tech represents.
The harder question that of risk management between the computing power we like on the one hand and its tendency to enable both megalomaniacs at the high end, and the unspeakable depravity of child pornography at the low.
None of those points are even remotely relevant in this case, unless you're worried about dolphin-English translators losing their livelihood?
Mindlessly parroting such talking points where they're not applicable is also a form of virtue-signalling.
And the comments in this thread are predominantly such virtue signalling nonsense.
I don’t remember saying I agree with these positions. I am actually opposed to the idea of making policy decisions based on moral values rather than consequentialist ethics, so I disagree with both.
When you make these tribal, political comments in a thread like this one - signaling your virtues - what do you prefer us to call it?
> It's trendy to hate Google,
Calling something "trendy" is a great way to try to dismiss it without actually providing any counterargument. The deep suspicion of anything Google does is extremely well justified IMHO.
Well enlighten me then, What's wrong with helping marine biologists trying to make sense of dolphin language?
How would you respond if asked you to explain why a tobacco company sponsoring a kid's sporting event might be anything less than wonderful?
Terrible analogy. This is not sponsoring but research. Google didn’t just give money in exchange for publicity. Google has traditionally invested in fundamental research that isn't commercially potential, at least in the short term.
If a tobacco company invested in lung cancer research that resulted in some treatment breakthroughs, that research should be celebrated, while their main business should continue to be condemned.
This is closer to being upset at any and all innovations done by an American because the USA does some terrible things. Not all parts of Google are directly tainted by ads and the people on these teams genuinely think they are working on important problems that help advance humanity. I don't think they are wrong to feel that way.
The dolphins aren't causing cancer in children.
Neither is said sporting event
But they might be planning to. We won't know until we are able to ask them.
That we know of!
Google is where great technology and innovation goes to die.
Please give me one example in the last decade where meta or Google research has led to actual products or open-sourced technologies, and not just expensive proprietary experiments shelved after billions were spent on them?
I'll wait.
The llama models
Too often it's just insecurity masking itself as posturing.
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Regardless of your or my feelings on this specific topic, "virtue signalling" is good because virtue is good and signalling to others that we ought to be good is also good. The use of that term as a pejorative is itself toxic cynicism
It's not even about the communication! Just having more insight into the brains and communication of other mammals has a ton of scientific value in its own right.
Sometimes it's good just to know things. If we needed to find a practical justification for everything before we started exploring it, we'd still be animals.
I for one am simply happy to see us trying to apply LLMs to something other than replacing call centers... humankind SHOULD be exploring and learning sometimes even when there isn't an ROI.
The ability to understanding bee's communication was made possible, so I'm not sure why dolphins would seem harder?
Don’t understand the cynicism either. Is this not way cooler than the latest pre-revenue series F marketing copy slop bot startup?
To me this task looks less like next token prediction language modeling and more like translating a single “word” at a time into English. It’s a pretty tractable problem. The harder parts probably come from all the messiness of hearing and playing sounds underwater.
I would imagine adapting to new vocab would be pretty clunky in an LLM based system. It would be interesting if it were able to add new words in real time.
Childhood dream aside, this to me seems like a much more legit use of AI than, say, generative art, so lame and pointless.
I'd be less cynnical if researchers hadn't announced the same thing like 10 years ago
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/science/dolphins-machine-...
Ah this is different. The Nytimes article is about identifying/classifying dolphins from audio. This new model is about communicating with dolphins from generated audio.
The difference between recognizing someone from hearing them, and actually talking to them!
Gemini supposedly allows for conversational speech w/your data. Have you tried it? We have; it's laughably bad and can't get the most basic stuff right from a well-crafted datamart.
If it can't do the most basic stuff, please explain to be how in the fuck it is going to understand dolphin language and why would should believe its results anyway?
"We couldn't make something work, so nobody can make anything work" is also a claim you can make, yes.
It's rather unsound reasoning, but you certainly can.
Oh I can make it work; but it’s definitely not as easy as they claim for business users and that was my point.
They have sufficient control over their model that they can presumably tailor it to their needs. Perhaps if you acquired analogous control, you’d have more success.
I work at Google on the Gemma team, and while not on the core team for this model, participated a bit on this project.
I personally was happy to see this project get built. The dolphin researchers have been doing great science for years, from the computational/mathematics side it was quite neat see how that was combined with the Gemma models.
It's great that dolphins are getting audio decoders in language models first, does the Gemma team intend to roll that out for human speech at some point eventually too?
Not directly related, but one of those stories that is so bizarre you almost can't believe it isn't made up.
There was a NASA funded attempt to communicate with Dolphins. This eccentric scientist created a house that was half water (a series of connected pools) and half dry spaces. A woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt lived full-time with the Dolphins attempting to learn a shared language between them.
Things went completely off the rails in many, many ways. The lead scientist became obsessed with LSD and built an isolation chamber above the house. This was like the sensory deprivation tanks you get now (often called float tanks). He would take LSD and place himself in the tank and believed he was psychically communicating with the Dolphins.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...
>A woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt lived full-time with the Dolphins attempting to learn a shared language between them.
She also had sex with a male dolphin called Peter.
>He would take LSD and place himself in the tank and believed he was psychically communicating with the Dolphins.
He eventually came to believe he was communicating with a cosmic entity called ECCO (Earth Coincidence Control Office). The story of the Sega game "Ecco the Dolphin" [1] is a tongue-in-cheek reference to this. I recommend watching the Atrocity Guide episode on John C. Lily and his dolphin "science" [2]. It's on par with The Men Who Stare at Goats (the non-fiction book [3], not the movie).
He has a website that looks like it's been untouched since his death, 2001: http://www.johnclilly.com/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecco_the_Dolphin
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UziFw-jQSks
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Men_Who_Stare_at_Goats
arguably the best episode of Drunken history has duncan trussel retelling this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7ruBotHWUs
Paraphrasing carl sagan: "You don't go to Japan and kidnap a Japanese man start jking him off, give him fing acid, and then ask him to learn English!"
It's funny you were thinking that, because I was thinking, "how would you teach a japanese man english?." The obvious answer is to jerk him off and give him high doses of LSD first. I immediately came to the same conclusion with this AI-dolphin stuff. Have they tried jerking off the dolphin and giving it LSD first? Apparently - yes.
Remember the game Ecco The Dolphin? Related... https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-ketamine-secrets-of-sega...
Know the story. Such a tragic end.
And it's a story that haunts the marine biology field. Imagine having to explain that one every time someone asks about it.
Oh yeah, imagine having to explain an experiment you had nothing to do with, that happened before you were born.
Imagine having to explain dragnet surveillance every time someone finds out you know how to code.
Imagine having to explain the Exon Valdez every time someone asks you about your car.
Roll out the reparations!
Tangential, but this brings up a really interesting question for me.
LLMs are multi-lingual without really trying assuming the languages in question are sufficiently well-represented in their training corpus.
I presume their ability to translate comes from the fact that there are lots of human-translated passages in their corpus; the same work in multiple languages, which lets them figure out the necessary mappings between semantic points (words.)
But I wonder about the translation capability of a model trained on multiple languages but with completely disjoint documents (no documents that were translations of another, no dictionaries, etc).
Could the emerging latent "concept space" of two completely different human languages be similar enough that the model could translate well, even without ever seeing examples of how a multilingual human would do a translation?
I don't have a strong intuition here but it seems plausible. And if so, that's remarkable because that's basically a science-fiction babelfish or universal translator.
Check out this recent benchmark MTOB (Machine Translation from One Book) -- relevant to your comment, though the book does have parallel passages so not exactly what you have in mind: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.16575
In the case of non-human communication, I know there has been some fairly well-motivated theorizing about the semantics of individual whale vocalizations. You could imagine a first pass at something like this if the meaning of (say) a couple dozen vocalizations could be characterized with a reasonable degree of confidence.
Super interesting domain that's ripe for some fresh perspectives imo. Feels like at this stage, all people can really do is throw stuff at the wall. The interesting part will begin when someone can get something to stick!
> that's basically a science-fiction babelfish or universal translator
Ten years ago I would have laughed at this notion, but today it doesn't feel that crazy.
I'd conjecture that over the next ten years, this general line of research will yield some non-obvious insights into the structure of non-human communication systems.
Increasingly feels like the sci-fi era has begun -- what a time to be alive.
>lots of human-translated passages in their corpus
Yes. I remember reading that the EU parliamentary proceedings in particular are used to train machine translation models. Unfortunately, I cant remember where I read that. I did find the dataset: https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/europarl
My hunch is it would work somewhat, but poorly.
Languages encode similar human experiences, so their conceptual spaces probably have natural alignments even without translation examples. Words for common objects or emotions might cluster similarly.
But without seeing actual translations, a model would miss nuances, idioms, and how languages carve up meaning differently. It might grasp that "dog" and "perro" relate to similar concepts without knowing they're direct translations.
To agree and extend, that's actually how human language works too. The cultural connotations of "dog" in english might be quite different from "perro".
And it gets even more complex because the connotations of "dog" in the USA in 2025 are unquestionably different from "dog" in England in 1599. I can only assume these distinctions also hold across languages. They're not a direct translation.
Let alone extreme cultural specificities... To follow the same example, how would one define "doge" now?
This sounds very cool at a conceptual level, but the article left me in the dark about what they're actually doing with DolphinGemma. The closest to an answer is:
>By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins' natural communication — a task previously requiring immense human effort.
But this doesn't really tell me anything. What does it mean to "help researchers uncover" this stuff? What is the model actually doing?
As far as I can tell, it hasn't actually done anything yet.
The article reads like the press releases you see from academic departments, where an earth shattering breakthrough is juuuuust around the corner. In every single department, of every single university.
It's more PR fluff than substance.
Cool to see the use of consumer phones as part of the setup. Having a suite of powerful sensors, processing, display, and battery in a single, compact, sealed package must be immensely useful for science.
I’m pretty sure by the time we decode what they’re saying it’ll be “so long, and thanks for all the fish”
That's the good outcome.
The bad outcome is the "AI" will translate our hellos as an insult, the dolphins will drop the masquerade, reveal themselves as our superiors and pound us into dust once and forever.
Picture the last surviving human surrounded by dolphins floating in the air with frickin laser beams coming out of their heads... all angrily asking "why did you say that about our mother?".
And in the background, ChatGPT is saying "I apologize if my previous response was not helpful".
This crowd seems to be cross pollinated with the sci-fi / space exploration set. Communication with cetaceans seems like such an obvious springboard for developing frameworks and techniques for first contact with E.T. /If/ you believe they're out there... And if not, what an incredible opportunity in its own right.
But, since context is so important to communication, I think this would be easier to accomplish with carefully built experiments with captive dolphin populations first. Beginning with wild dolphins is like dropping a guy from New York City into rural Mongolia and hoping he'll learn the language.
Can a powerful model become a fantastic autocomplete for dolphins ? Sure. Someday soon that's very likely to happen. But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means.
To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree.
It would help if the dolphins are also interested in teaching us. Dolphins or we could say to the other '... that is how we pronounce sea-cucumber'. Shared nouns would be the easiest.
The next level, a far harder level, would be to reach the stage where we can say 'the emotion that you are feeling now, that we call "anger"'.
We will no quite have the right word for "anxiety that I feel when my baby's blood flow doesn't sound right in Doppler".
Teaching or learning 'ennui' and 'schadenfreude' would be a whole lot harder.
This begs a question can one fully feel and understand an emotion we do not have a word for ? Perhaps Wittgenstein has an answer.
Postscript: I seem to have triggered quite a few of you and that has me surprised. I thought this would be neither controversial nor unpopular. It's ironic in a way. If we can't understand each other, understanding dolphin "speech" would be a tough hill to climb.
The fact that you cannot wrap your head around something doesn't mean that it's not possible. I do not claim that it is surely possible nor that it isn't. But it sure as hell looks possible. You also probably don't have kids. For example: how do you teach a child to speak? Or someone a new language? You show them some objects and their pronunciation. The same with the seagrass and/or a scarf. That's one way. Dolphins can also see (divers with) some objects and name them. We can also guess what they are saying from the sounds plus the actions they do. That's probably how we got "seagrass" in the first place.
For all the word that they don't have in their language, we/they can invent them. Just like we do all the time: artificial intelligence, social network, skyscraper, surfboard, tuxedo, black hole, whatever...
It might also be possible that dolphins' language uses the same patterns as our language(s) and that an LLM that knows both can manage to translate between the two.
I suggest a bit more optimistic look on the world, especially on something that's pretty-much impossible to have any negative consequences for humanity.
Calm down. No need to be rude and condescending and throw personal insults.
If you had read this part --
"But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means.
To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds. Observation of dolphin-dolphin interaction would help but to a limited degree."
it ought to have been clear that what I am arguing is a corpus of dolphin communication fed to an LLM alone will not suffice. A lot of investments have to be made in this part -- To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds.
I am sure both you and me would be very happy the day we can have some conversation with dolphins.
That's exactly the argument here. You do not think this is possible. I think it _might be_. You believe we cannot understand their language because we don't have "shared experiences" (etc). I believe we can. That's the disagreement. AI can learn/predict/invent new things. It already is inventing new materials, new protein structures, etc. We don't need to understand the exact mechanism 100% for it to be able to do it. Let's give it a shot.
There are tons of shared experiences and shared emotions. It's not like there's some hidden organism that we discovered are making noise from within the dark matter. These are animals in the oceans. Plenty of shared experiences and emotions. Dolphins have feelings. Anyway... let's agree to disagree. I fully support this project and am optimistic about its outcomes.
> You do not think this is possible.
Not at all.
I believe just throwing a corpus of dolphin-dolphin vocalizations at an LLM will fall very short.
I quote myself again -- 'But that alone would tell us almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means".
Note the emphasis on the word alone.
What needs to happen is to build shared experiences, perhaps with a pod and incorporate that into the ML training process. If this succeeds this exercise of building shared experience will do heavier lifting than the LLM.
Had you spent less effort in coming up with insults and used the leftover processing bandwidth to understand my position it would have made for a nicer exchange. For restoring civility to our conversation I indeed do not hold high hopes.
> shared experiences and emotions
I suspect the experience of being a dolphin is stranger and more alien than we will ever know. This is a creature that employs its sense of sonar as part of how it understands the world, and has evolved with that sense. It will have concepts related to sonar and echolocation that we cannot grasp. We might be able to map a clumsy understanding of them, e.g. a dolphin cannot smell, it might be able to understand "my nose can taste the air", but is that the same? At least in humans with sensory deficiencies, there are parts of the brain that have evolved alongside the same senses that an unimpaired person has.
Maybe we could finagle an interspecies pidgin, but I wouldn't be surprised if we just fool ourselves for a while before we realize that dolphin language is just different. Even the word language brings along a set of rules and concepts that are almost certainly uniquely human.
Indeed! As Witt once said, "if a lion could speak, we would not understand it." (https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5)
Is it common to abbreviate Wittgenstein to "Witt"? Don't recall seeing/hearing that before, but it's been awhile since undergrad.
Sorry, it's not really, just a personal nickname for him. Although I think I recall that Austin would call him Witters (very much to this annoyance).
I think you are describing more of an edge case than you might think for a vertebrate, mammal, social, warm blooded, air breathing, earth living, pack hunter.
Yes there is a lot we have common, especially the social part. But our worlds and primary senses are really very different.
Even a limited success would gladden my heart.
>To understand their language we need shared experiences, shared emotions, common internal worlds
Why? With modern AI there exists unsupervised learning for translation where you don't have to explicitly make translation pairs between the 2 languages. It seems possible to eventually create a way to translate without having to have a teaching process for individual words like you describe.
Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.
https://www.boredpanda.com/color-descriptions-blind-people/
How do we explain things like plasma and UV to anyone?
This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.
The word is just a 'pointer' to the underlying shared experience, so I don't think you could; the kid would come away thinking red is the same thing as the feeling of splinters or the warmth of a sunset, which isn't what red is, those are just feelings maybe associated with red. That said - I'm actually pretty confident we'll be able to have basic "conversations" made of basic snippets of information with dolphins and whales in my lifetime. Maybe not complex grammatical structure we identify with, but small stuff like: "I'm hungry". I'm not sure if dolphins could understand "fish or octopus for dinner?", because they might not have any idea of a logical 'OR', and perhaps they might don't even differentiate between fish/octopus.
We do share (presumably) experiences of hunger, pain, happiness, the perception of gradations of light and shape/form within them, some kind of dimensionally bound spatial medium they exist in as an individual and are moving through - though of course they might not conceive of these as "dimensions" or "space", they would surely have analogs for directional words - although given they aren't constrained to live on top of a 2D surface, these might not be "up", "down", "left", "right", but something in the vein of "lightward" or "darkward" as the two main directions, and then some complicated 3D rotational coordinate system for modeling direction. Who knows, maybe they even use quaternions!
Very poetically put and absolutely agree.
For the subset of shared experiences and emotions this should be possible, not only that, I feel that we must try (as in, it's a moral/ ethical obligation).
Training an ML on dialogues alone will not be enough. One would need to spend a lot of time to build up a wealth of shared experiences, so that one can learn the mapping/correspondence.
That might only get to a point that there is an understanding that something called "chrome red" exists. But for a blind child who isn't exposed to the concept of vision, let alone color. It's just a name and relations with other names. That lacks semantics.
Without grounding in some form of experience one can learn grammar and syntax but not understanding. "Chrome red" is a whole lot easier to teach than say the concept of "jealousy" when that's not part of a shared world of experience.
It's possible to learn a dictionary without understanding any of what those words mean. Dictionary just gives relations among the dictionary words themselves. That's it.
It takes a sensory or emotional experience to ground those words for learning.
Nouns are easy because you can point and teach, that there is a correspondence with the word 'apple' and the physical object that you are experiencing now. Abstract concepts emotions are much harder. There the need for shared experience is much stronger.
There's quite a bit of recorded knowledge for these things. Experiences of Hellen Keller. There's a story of a deaf man who could use sign language, but had an overwhelming and tearful experience in his thirties when it finally clicked that the sign for a 'door' has a correspondence for a door that his teacher was pointing at. Till that point, signing was just some meaningless ritualistic ceremony that needed to be mastered for social acceptance.
I'm not sure what you are trying to argue. That it's impossible to translate between blind and sighted people because they don't "truley" experience color? That's clearly not the case. Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.
I elaborated here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684124
> Even with emotions different languages independently came up with words for them and we can still translate between those languages.
Of course. That's a no-brainer that different human languages have come up with names for experiences they share.
The hard part is learning the correspondence between say two nouns in different languages that mean the same thing.
Its perfectly possible for an unsupervised ML to use the French word 'rouge' in a French sentence but the notion that 'rouge' corresponds to 'red' in English has to come from some shared grounded experience/emotion.
The French word x word relationship graph has to get connected to the English word x word relationship graph.
BTW for people born deaf and blind it's an enormous challenge just to get to the point where the person understand that things have names. For example for Hellen Keller, it was a very non-trivial event when it finally clicked that the wet sensation she was feeling had a correspondence with what her teacher was writing on her arm. They were lucky that wet was an experience that was common between her and her teacher, lucky that Hellen Keller could experience wetness. Someone or something has to play the same role for dolphins and us. Just a corpus will not suffice.
imagine thinking qualia can be described and understood... with words! lol lmao
SeaQuest anyone? I still have the first comic.
Darwin likes!
The experiment design sounds pretty cool. I hope they see some cool results. It would be very cool if humans could talk to another intelligent creature here on earth. This is certainly a step on the way there.
I wonder what's the status quo on the non-LLM side; are we able to manually decode sound patterns to recognize dolphin's communication to some degree? If that's the case, I guess this may have a chance.
If only John C. Lilly was alive...
so, did it work?... anyone knows what is the result of this work?
The article says that they've only just begun deploying it, and that it will merely be used to speed up the process of recognizing patterns.
> WDP is beginning to deploy DolphinGemma this field season with immediate potential benefits. By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins' natural communication — a task previously requiring immense human effort. Eventually, these patterns, augmented with synthetic sounds created by the researchers to refer to objects with which the dolphins like to play, may establish a shared vocabulary with the dolphins for interactive communication.
Wouldn't have even been a believable April fools joke even 5 years ago.
My secret wish is that once they decode the language, they hear the dolphin say to themselves: look, it's again those idiot humans trying to bother us, why can't they just live happily like we do?
And then the world will suddenly understand...
The application of modern LLM technology to animal communication is exciting.
The only output I'll believe from this is "So long, and thanks for all the fish!"
I guess Douglas Adams isn't something a lot of people read these days.
I got the reference and appreciate it. What a fantastic set of books.
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"Lies Dolphins Said About Orcas" - the tell-all book about how Orcas went extinct /s
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Ooh wow, dolphins.
Dolphins are cool animals. Google AI decodes dolphins. Google AI is cool.
"Matthews... we're getting another one of those strange 'aw blah es span yol' sounds."
"How Google AI is helping further the warming of our planet's oceans, further diminishing wild dolphin habitats worldwide"
This looks like a marine biologist desperately wanted to keep their job in spite of the "nothing that's not AI" mandate so they made up some bullshit.
They’ve been working on decoding dolphin sounds for a long time - Thad was telling me about this project in 2015 and it had been ongoing for a while. One challenge is doing this realtime is extremely difficult because of the frequency the dolphin speech occurs in. And they want to do this realtime which adds to the difficulty level. The other challenge on the AI side is that traditional AI is done using supervised learning whereas dolphin speech would require unsupervised learning. It would be interesting to learn more about how Gemma is helping here.
That is a surprisingly cynical take; the marine biologists in question seemed pretty enthusiastic in the video!
I'm not saying this is the case here, but every time I've been in internal or promotional videos related to my work, I've been performing for a camera. I'm not playing a theater character, but it's also not what you'd get if you dropped by my desk and asked me the same questions. Calling it acting might seem strong. But it's not not acting. So it's acting.
Does the general principle "we're always performing, in a particular costume, for our audience" help confirm the excited marine biologist desperately wanted to keep their job in spite of a "nothing that's not AI" mandate, so they made up some bullshit?
Separately, could invoking it anytime someone appears excited be described as distrustful of human sincerity or integrity?
After working through these exercises, my answers are no/yes, which leaves me having to agree its clearly cynical. (because "define:cynical" returns "distrustful of human sincerity or integrity")
Was I the only one who thought it was related to dolphin uncensored models over gemma