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DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication

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

#41

Post by Imnimo »

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?

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

#42

Post by garciasn »

groby_b wrote: post #33
garciasn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"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.

Oh I can make it work; but it’s definitely not as easy as they claim for business users and that was my point.

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

#44

Post by amarant »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #12

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…

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.

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

#45

Post by Nifty3929 »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #12

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'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.

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

#46

Post by lukev »

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.

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

#47

Post by lukev »

ZeroCool2u wrote: post #12

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…

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.

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

#48

Post by srean »

Mystery-Machine wrote: post #28
srean wrote: 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…

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.

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

#50

Post by finnh »

ruthvik947 wrote: post #5
srean wrote: 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…

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

Is it common to abbreviate Wittgenstein to "Witt"? Don't recall seeing/hearing that before, but it's been awhile since undergrad.
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