DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

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.

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.

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.

The ability to understanding bee's communication was made possible, so I'm not sure why dolphins would seem harder?

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?

>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

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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".

Indeed! As Witt once said, "if a lion could speak, we would not understand it." (https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5)

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.

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.

Darwin likes!