I work at Google on the Gemma team, and while not on the core team for this model, participated a bit on this project.<p>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.
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:<p>>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.<p>But this doesn't really tell me anything. What does it mean to "help researchers uncover" this stuff? What is the model actually <i>doing</i>?
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.
Tangential, but this brings up a really interesting question for me.<p>LLMs are multi-lingual without really trying assuming the languages in question are sufficiently well-represented in their training corpus.<p>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.)<p>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).<p>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?<p>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.
Wow, there's a lot of cynicism in this thread, even for HN.<p>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?<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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 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.
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?<p>And then the world will suddenly understand...
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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"'.<p>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".<p>Teaching or learning 'ennui' and 'schadenfreude' would be a whole lot harder.<p>This begs a question can one fully feel and understand an emotion we do not have a word for ? Perhaps Wittgenstein has an answer.<p>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.
Not directly related, but one of those stories that is so bizarre you almost can't believe it isn't made up.<p>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.<p>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.<p>1. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...</a>
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.