81–90 of 221 posts
A very interesting read, which describes how for ~50 years the community was lead astray by a seemingly simple oversight: studying dead animals instead of living ones! >Charles Darwin theorized that monkeys had the vocal anatomy needed for speech, but lacked the necessary neural mechanisms. >This was the most popular hypothesis until 1969 [when] Lieberman studied the vocal anatomy of a monkey corpse and concluded tha…
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I've also been wondering this. Can we train an LLM on dolphin noises? I suspect the problem is the training data. If we don't know what the dolphin squeaks mean, we can't really filter the training data to include only meaningful "language." But I do wonder how far we could get by just dumping a bunch of dolphin recordings into an LLM and getting it to make the same noises... The other side of that same problem is th…
I feel the only recognisable words we’d decode is a farewell and some kind of gratitude about food…
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There's something about watching other primates interact with screens that just feels so uncanny . It's an almost humbling experience, seeing how much they look like us tapping and scrolling. The only difference seems to be that we think we understand more of what we're looking at on the screen... but do we really ?
> Do we really? Yes. We do. Significantly more. It’s our only power. We aren’t stronger or faster or more vicious, we cannot fly or breed dozens of humans at a time or puke honey. We can’t swim the ocean depths or swing through the trees. But we sure can think, understand and create. For better or worse. I’m all for not underestimating animals. They are sentient like us. But not at the cost of dismissing the human an…
We're also pretty good long-distance runners.
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I believe this category is referred to as "uplifting" [0]. And while it certainly hasn't been proved to be viable so far, are you really sure it's time to rule it out as a possibility? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_(science_fiction)
No, invalidated science fiction. The science being invalid. Meaning the vocal cords were the weak link. When it was not.
Mind you, I tried to think up a fun word for this and failed which is why you're getting this answer instead of a word.
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There's something about watching other primates interact with screens that just feels so uncanny . It's an almost humbling experience, seeing how much they look like us tapping and scrolling. The only difference seems to be that we think we understand more of what we're looking at on the screen... but do we really ?
> Do we really? Yes. We do. Significantly more. It’s our only power. We aren’t stronger or faster or more vicious, we cannot fly or breed dozens of humans at a time or puke honey. We can’t swim the ocean depths or swing through the trees. But we sure can think, understand and create. For better or worse. I’m all for not underestimating animals. They are sentient like us. But not at the cost of dismissing the human an…
IIRC we actually smell as well as dogs too, if we get down to floor level.
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I've also been wondering this. Can we train an LLM on dolphin noises? I suspect the problem is the training data. If we don't know what the dolphin squeaks mean, we can't really filter the training data to include only meaningful "language." But I do wonder how far we could get by just dumping a bunch of dolphin recordings into an LLM and getting it to make the same noises... The other side of that same problem is th…
> If parrots can talk, why can’t monkeys?
> Parrots are able to mimic human speech because they have a specialized vocal organ, called a syrinx, that allows them to control the sounds they produce. This ability is not shared by all birds, but it is particularly well developed in parrots.
Monkeys, on the other hand, do not have the same type of vocal organ as birds, and so they are not able to produce the same range of sounds. While monkeys do communicate with each other using a variety of vocalizations, these sounds are not as complex or as adaptable as human speech.
Additionally, language is not just about making sounds, it is also about understanding and using complex grammatical rules and abstract concepts. While some primates have demonstrated a degree of language comprehension and production in scientific studies, their abilities are still far from the complexity and flexibility of human language.
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That’s not the conclusion at all. The article says monkeys can understand and produce words (via signs). They can’t talk because they don’t have control of their larynx. They’re mute essentially.
Chimpanzees are intelligent and willing to do something like communicating, and can maybe produce words/signs, but they don't produce sentences/syntax and they never ask questions. Supposedly parrots can do that one. Related question: which animals understand humans pointing at things?