PieFedGoogle created a new AI model for talking to dolphins
sabreW4K3arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/google-created-…
cross-posted from: https://lazysoci.al/post/24693759
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🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮They're gonna tell us about the new intergalactic super highway being built through the solar system.
itisileclerkThey’re gonna tell us about the new intergalactic super highway being built through the solar system.
I am not panicking, I have my towel.
TeamAssimilationThey have a brain as complex as ours, they’re social, and they’re believed to be really smart.
If they’re actually dumb, very dumb, I swear to god I will buy a single non-certified dolphin-free tuna can out of spite.
massive_bereavementAfaik whales have more spindle neurons than we do:
https://www.science.org/content/article/well-wired-whales
This is probably one of the best actual uses for something like generative AI. With enough data, they should be able to vectorize and translate dolphin language, assuming there is one.
The ultimate goal is to speak dolphin, if indeed there is such a language. The pursuit of this goal has led WDP to create a massive, meticulously labeled data set, which Google says is perfect for analysis with generative AI.
So they're aiming for a real-life version of SeaQuest DSV? Considering Season 1 was set in 2018-2019, we're 7 years behind schedule so far...
When that happens and one can talk to dolphins:
- There will be a debatte about dolphins and animal rights
- There will pop up startups with Talk-to-your-dog/cats/whatever-AI
- In 10 year or so, we might discover that one can communicate to trees, flowers, plants as well through chemical transmitters or whatsever
There's already talk-to-your-dog/cat products such as FluentPet. Probably the biggest issue with cats in particular is that their "vocabulary" is quite limited (usually less than a dozen distinct "meows"), but some of the FluentPet users (examples on Youtube such as BilliSpeaks) seem to suggest basic reasoning. A full-blown language is beyond them, but they do seem capable of understanding more concepts than we give them credit for.
And this is how we will go down.
Well I for one welcome our new AI Dolphin overlords
1024_KibibytesObviously! Look at the current world leaders. We might as well try the dolphins.
FFS, our first verbal contact with nonhuman persons is going to cause a diplomatic crisis 🤦
Something something tarifs, something something antisemitism
Something speciesist Flipper jokes something.
It's just going to hallucinate bullshit. Because we have so much training data of conversations between humans and dolphins don't we?
Just the 40 years, for that specific group of dolphins.
So imagine the language model can produce grammatically correct and semantically meaningful dolphin language, how does it translate that to a human language?
The reason LLMs can do this for human languages is that we have an enormous corpus of Rosetta stones for every language that allow the model to correlate concepts in each language. The training data for human to dolphin is going to be just these “behavioural notes.”
So the outcome is that the bullshitting machine will bullshit the scientists that it knows what they’re saying when it’s actually just making stuff up.
It’s a big problem with LLMs that they very rarely answer, “I don’t know.”
LLMs use a tokenizer stage to convert input data into NN inputs, then a de-tokenizer at the output.
Those tokens are not limited to "human language", they can as well be positions, orientations, directions, movements, etc. "Body language", or the flight pattern of a bee, are as tokenizable as any other input data.
The concepts a dolphin language may have, no matter what they are, could then be described in a human language, and/or matched to human words for the same description.
So long and thanks for all the fish
...but dolphins don't all speak the same language?
The heading sounds interesting. If they develop it well will we be able to communicate with dolphins with this ai tech? Or does it already work?