Posted by alphabetting 4/14/2025
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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
To do this likely would require large-scale war.
- No, f... the sharks!
Side bonus, we also don’t kill the highly sentient and highly intelligent creatures you’re concerned about.
Those people can all just starve, and you're fine with that?
1. https://www.worldwildlife.org/stories/will-there-be-enough-f...
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..."
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.
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.
Certainly will be interesting to see how much we can bribe Dolphins to do once we have faster communication methods.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/science/dolphins-machine-...
The difference between recognizing someone from hearing them, and actually talking to them!
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?
It's rather unsound reasoning, but you certainly can.
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.
> 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.