by alphabetting on 4/14/25, 1:12 PM with 138 comments
by canyon289 on 4/14/25, 4:45 PM
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 Imnimo on 4/14/25, 6:11 PM
>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?
by xnx on 4/14/25, 4:41 PM
by lukev on 4/14/25, 6:15 PM
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.
by ZeroCool2u on 4/14/25, 4:20 PM
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.
by engineer_22 on 4/14/25, 11:15 PM
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.
by summerlight on 4/14/25, 9:40 PM
by tpl on 4/15/25, 3:21 AM
by meindnoch on 4/14/25, 6:40 PM
by nikolayasdf123 on 4/14/25, 3:54 PM
by oulipo on 4/14/25, 7:14 PM
And then the world will suddenly understand...
by dcl on 4/15/25, 7:04 AM
by floridianfisher on 4/14/25, 5:42 PM
by srean on 4/14/25, 3:46 PM
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.
by neuroelectron on 4/14/25, 4:28 PM
by zoogeny on 4/14/25, 6:49 PM
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-dolp...
by sarreph on 4/14/25, 3:53 PM
by givemeethekeys on 4/15/25, 2:50 PM
by rcarmo on 4/14/25, 6:03 PM
by nightfly on 4/14/25, 4:06 PM
by xena on 4/14/25, 4:04 PM
by palashkulsh on 4/14/25, 4:26 PM