[HN Gopher] DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphi...
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DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
Author : alphabetting
Score : 217 points
Date : 2025-04-14 13:12 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.google)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.google)
| srean wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| Indeed! As Witt once said, "if a lion could speak, we would not
| understand it." (https://iep.utm.edu/wittgens/#H5)
| finnh wrote:
| Is it common to abbreviate Wittgenstein to "Witt"? Don't
| recall seeing/hearing that before, but it's been awhile since
| undergrad.
| weard_beard wrote:
| 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.
| srean wrote:
| Yes 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a
| chilf blind from birth.
| charcircuit wrote:
| This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt
| and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.
| srean wrote:
| That 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.
| charcircuit wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are trying to argue. That it's
| impossible to translate between blind and sighted people
| because they don't "truley" experience color? That's
| clearly not the case. Even with emotions different
| languages independently came up with words for them and
| we can still translate between those languages.
| srean wrote:
| I elaborated here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43684124
|
| > Even with emotions different languages independently
| came up with words for them and we can still translate
| between those languages.
|
| Of course. That's a no-brainer that different human
| languages have come up with names for experiences they
| share.
|
| The hard part is learning the correspondence between say
| two nouns in different languages that mean the same
| thing.
|
| Its perfectly possible for an unsupervised ML to use the
| French word 'rouge' in a French sentence but the notion
| that 'rouge' corresponds to 'red' in English has to come
| from some shared grounded experience/emotion.
|
| The French word x word relationship graph has to get
| connected to the English word x word relationship graph.
|
| BTW for people born deaf and blind it's an enormous
| challenge just to get to the point where the person
| understand that things have names. For example for Hellen
| Keller, it was a very non-trivial event when it finally
| clicked that the wet sensation she was feeling had a
| correspondence with what her teacher was writing on her
| arm. They were lucky that wet was an experience that was
| common between her and her teacher, lucky that Hellen
| Keller could experience wetness. Someone or something has
| to play the same role for dolphins and us. Just a corpus
| will not suffice.
| ht-syseng wrote:
| The word is just a 'pointer' to the underlying shared
| experience, so I don't think you could; the kid would
| come away thinking red is the same thing as the feeling
| of splinters or the warmth of a sunset, which isn't what
| red is, those are just feelings maybe associated with
| red. That said - I'm actually pretty confident we'll be
| able to have basic "conversations" made of basic snippets
| of information with dolphins and whales in my lifetime.
| Maybe not complex grammatical structure we identify with,
| but small stuff like: "I'm hungry". I'm not sure if
| dolphins could understand "fish or octopus for dinner?",
| because they might not have any idea of a logical 'OR',
| and perhaps they might don't even differentiate between
| fish/octopus.
|
| We do share (presumably) experiences of hunger, pain,
| happiness, the perception of gradations of light and
| shape/form within them, some kind of dimensionally bound
| spatial medium they exist in as an individual and are
| moving through - though of course they might not conceive
| of these as "dimensions" or "space", they would surely
| have analogs for directional words - although given they
| aren't constrained to live on top of a 2D surface, these
| might not be "up", "down", "left", "right", but something
| in the vein of "lightward" or "darkward" as the two main
| directions, and then some complicated 3D rotational
| coordinate system for modeling direction. Who knows,
| maybe they even use quaternions!
| srean wrote:
| Very poetically put and absolutely agree.
|
| For the subset of shared experiences and emotions this
| should be possible, not only that, I feel that we must
| try (as in, it's a moral/ ethical obligation).
|
| Training an ML on dialogues alone will not be enough. One
| would need to spend a lot of time to build up a wealth of
| shared experiences, so that one can learn the
| mapping/correspondence.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| imagine thinking qualia can be described and
| understood... with words! lol lmao
| Teever wrote:
| How do we explain things like plasma and UV to anyone?
| Mystery-Machine wrote:
| 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.
| srean wrote:
| Calm 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 wrote:
| That'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.
| srean wrote:
| > You do not think this is possible.
|
| Not at all.
|
| I believe _just_ throwing a corpus of dolphin-dolphin
| vocalizations at an LLM will fall very short.
|
| I quote myself again -- 'But that _alone_ would tell us
| almost nothing of what dolphin dialogue means ".
|
| Note the emphasis on the word _alone_.
|
| What needs to happen is to build shared experiences,
| perhaps with a pod and incorporate that into the ML
| training process. If this succeeds this exercise of
| building shared experience will do heavier lifting than
| the LLM.
|
| Had you spent less effort in coming up with insults and
| used the leftover processing bandwidth to understand my
| position it would have made for a nicer exchange. For
| restoring civility to our conversation I indeed do not
| hold high hopes.
| sarreph wrote:
| I'm pretty sure by the time we decode what they're saying it'll
| be "so long, and thanks for all the fish"
| nottorp wrote:
| 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".
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| so, did it work?... anyone knows what is the result of this work?
| rideontime wrote:
| The 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 wrote:
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| They'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 wrote:
| That is a surprisingly cynical take; the marine biologists in
| question seemed pretty enthusiastic in the video!
| dogleash wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Does 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 wrote:
| "Matthews... we're getting another one of those strange 'aw blah
| es span yol' sounds."
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| Wow, 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 wrote:
| 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.
| morkalork wrote:
| I'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-...
| canyon289 wrote:
| Ah 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 wrote:
| Gemini 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 wrote:
| "We couldn't make something work, so nobody can make anything
| work" is also a claim you can make, yes.
|
| It's rather unsound reasoning, but you certainly can.
| garciasn wrote:
| Oh I can make it work; but it's definitely not as easy as
| they claim for business users and that was my point.
| janalsncm wrote:
| 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.
| amarant wrote:
| 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.
| lotyrin wrote:
| "virtue signalling" really is one of those words/turns of
| phrase that needs to be put on a high shelf.
|
| 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.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I believe it meets the definition of virtue signaling to
| express a position you don't do anything to advocate -
| which is the vast majority of opinions expressed on the
| Internet. It can be a sincerely held belief but if you're
| not taking action around it I don't see any difference from
| the corporate example you gave.
| nfw2 wrote:
| Your statement is virtue signaling according to its own
| definition unless you've taken action to prevent people
| complaining about Google.
| amarant wrote:
| None of those points are even remotely relevant in this
| case, unless you're worried about dolphin-English
| translators losing their livelihood?
|
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| Too often it's just insecurity masking itself as posturing.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| 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.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| I am all for the Disney utopian fantasy of us living with
| animals.
|
| 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..."
| lesuorac wrote:
| I suspect Dolphins can tell people apart and will recognize
| you as not the guy that threw the bottle cap akin to all
| those stories about crows.
|
| Certainly will be interesting to see how much we can bribe
| Dolphins to do once we have faster communication methods.
| 9dev wrote:
| So you think you're not responsible for the fucked-up
| oceans because you let other people throw your trash into
| the sea for you, and the organically farmed salmon you
| eat surely wasn't produced under atrocious conditions?
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I'm not suggesting a Disney utopian fantasy. I'm just
| suggesting that in a very pragmatic way, we can ask them
| questions and get meaningful answers, or ask them to do
| things for us.
|
| 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.
| k7sune wrote:
| I was just reading how fishing industry's longlines have
| caught many dolphins and other bycatches. It would be great
| to be able to give them warnings, or even better, to ask them
| to keep other big animals away from the longlines.
| gazebo64 wrote:
| I know this comment is totally innocent but it does kind of
| bum me out to be at a point in time where instead of
| addressing our impact on the environment directly, we're
| trying to make computers that can talk to dolphins so we
| can tell them to stay out of the way lol
| kuhewa wrote:
| You don't tend to hear about it and not that there isn't
| still progress to be made, but there has been tonnes of
| progress on fisheries interactions with protected bycatch
| species. For ex the infamous dolphin problem in the
| eastern tropical Pacific purse seine tuna fishery is down
| 99.8% from its peak to the point populations are
| recovering, despite the fishery intentionally setting on
| dolphin schools to catch > 150,000 t of yellowfin tuna
| per year.
|
| 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.
| theyinwhy wrote:
| Dear Mr Dolphin, can you please tell the large sharks to
| not go that way?
|
| - No, f... the sharks!
| 9dev wrote:
| Or, like, we could stop ravaging the oceans by industrial
| fishing, stop pretending magical technology will save the
| day, and try to limit our resource consumption to
| sustainable levels?
|
| 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!_
| lukev wrote:
| 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.
| j45 wrote:
| The ability to understanding bee's communication was made
| possible, so I'm not sure why dolphins would seem harder?
| palashkulsh wrote:
| Was I the only one who thought it was related to dolphin
| uncensored models over gemma
| neuroelectron wrote:
| SeaQuest anyone? I still have the first comic.
| exe34 wrote:
| Darwin likes!
| xnx wrote:
| 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.
| canyon289 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| 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?
| floridianfisher wrote:
| The application of modern LLM technology to animal communication
| is exciting.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The only output I'll believe from this is "So long, and thanks
| for all the fish!"
| rcarmo wrote:
| I guess Douglas Adams isn't something a lot of people read
| these days.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| "How Google AI is helping further the warming of our planet's
| oceans, further diminishing wild dolphin habitats worldwide"
| Imnimo wrote:
| 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:
|
| >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 wrote:
| 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.
| lukev wrote:
| Tangential, 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 wrote:
| 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.
| lukev wrote:
| To 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?
| meindnoch wrote:
| If only John C. Lilly was alive...
| zoogeny wrote:
| Not 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-
| dolp...
| srean wrote:
| Know the story. Such a tragic end.
| maebert wrote:
| 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 j _king him off, give him f_ ing acid, and
| then ask him to learn English!"
| oulipo wrote:
| 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?
|
| And then the world will suddenly understand...
| summerlight wrote:
| 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.
| rambambram wrote:
| Ooh wow, dolphins.
|
| Dolphins are cool animals. Google AI decodes dolphins. Google AI
| is cool.
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