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DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
71–80 of 151 posts
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Dear Mr Dolphin, can you please tell the large sharks to not go that way?
- No, f... the sharks!
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"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…
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.
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
"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…
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.
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#75I 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.
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?
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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!
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#77I 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.
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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..."
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.
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?
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
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.
Re: DolphinGemma: How Google AI is helping decode dolphin communication
#80[flagged]