Live data from Hacker News

DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

blog.google

21–30 of 151 posts

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#21
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.

This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.

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.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#22
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.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#23

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…

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-...

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!

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#24
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.

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 con…

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.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#25

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…

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?

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#26
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.

This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.

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!

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#27
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teach the meaning and understanding of 'chrome red' to a chilf blind from birth.

This can easily be done by giving that prompt to chatgpt and allowing the child to ask it follow up questions.

imagine thinking qualia can be described and understood... with words! lol lmao

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#28
post #2

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…

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.

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#29
post #3

I’m pretty sure by the time we decode what they’re saying it’ll be “so long, and thanks for all the fish”

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".

Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

#30
post #2

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…

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN