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DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
- srean 1y agoCan 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.
- ruthvik947 1y agoIndeed! As Witt once said, "if a lion could speak, we would not understand it." (https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5 https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5)
- finnh 1y agoIs it common to abbreviate Wittgenstein to "Witt"? Don't recall seeing/hearing that before, but it's been awhile since undergrad.
- ruthvik947 1y agoSorry, 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).
- weard_beard 1y agoI 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.
- srean 1y agoYes 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.
- charcircuit 1y ago>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.
- srean 1y agoTeach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.
- charcircuit 1y agoThis can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.
- srean 1y agoThat 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.
- Mystery-Machine 1y agoThe 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.
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- srean 1y agoCalm 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.
- Mystery-Machine 1y agoThat'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.
- sarreph 1y agoI’m pretty sure by the time we decode what they’re saying it’ll be “so long, and thanks for all the fish”
- nottorp 1y agoThat'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".
- nikolayasdf123 1y agoso, did it work?... anyone knows what is the result of this work?
- rideontime 1y agoThe 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.
- xena 1y agoThis 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.
- vlovich123 1y agoThey’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.
- Philpax 1y agoThat is a surprisingly cynical take; the marine biologists in question seemed pretty enthusiastic in the video!
- dogleash 1y agoI'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.
- refulgentis 1y agoDoes 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")
- nightfly 1y ago"Matthews... we're getting another one of those strange 'aw blah es span yol' sounds."
- ZeroCool2u 1y agoWow, 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.
- davedigerati 1y agoI 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.
- morkalork 1y agoI'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-learning-algorithm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/science/dolphins-machine-...
- canyon289 1y agoAh 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!
- garciasn 1y agoGemini 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?
- groby_b 1y ago
- palashkulsh 1y agoWas I the only one who thought it was related to dolphin uncensored models over gemma
- neuroelectron 1y agoSeaQuest anyone? I still have the first comic.
- exe34 1y agoDarwin likes!
- xnx 1y agoCool 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.
- canyon289 1y agoI 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.
- moffkalast 1y agoIt'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?
- floridianfisher 1y agoThe application of modern LLM technology to animal communication is exciting.
- rcarmo 1y agoThe only output I'll believe from this is "So long, and thanks for all the fish!"
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago[flagged]
- Imnimo 1y agoThis 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?
- bjt 1y agoAs 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.
- lukev 1y agoTangential, 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.
- beernet 1y agoMy 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.
- lukev 1y agoTo 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?
- ahartman00 1y ago>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 https://paperswithcode.com/dataset/europarl
- meindnoch 1y agoIf only John C. Lilly was alive...
- zoogeny 1y agoNot 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-dolphin-who-loved-me https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...
- srean 1y agoKnow the story. Such a tragic end.
- zeroping 1y agoAnd it's a story that haunts the marine biology field. Imagine having to explain that one every time someone asks about it.
- nandomrumber 1y agoOh 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!
- maebert 1y agoarguably the best episode of Drunken history has duncan trussel retelling this story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7ruBotHWUs 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!"
- oulipo 1y agoMy 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...
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- summerlight 1y agoI 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.
- rambambram 1y ago[flagged]
- engineer_22 1y agoThis 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.
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- tpl 1y agoThe 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.
- dcl 1y agoWouldn't have even been a believable April fools joke even 5 years ago.
- timonofathens 1y ago[dead]
- givemeethekeys 1y ago"Lies Dolphins Said About Orcas" - the tell-all book about how Orcas went extinct /s
- bigdatajs 1y ago[flagged]