A new, large-scale language model AI system allows humans to immediately talk to dolphins. Researchers who are expected to debut in the next few months, Ilfingenma And its companion cetacean hearing enhancement telemetry (chat) system can translate and mimic some of the mammals’ own complex vocalizations. If successful, the breakthrough could represent the culmination of over 40 years of work, documentation and conservation efforts.
Dolphins are some of the smartest and most communicative animals on the planet. Their social interactions are very complicated, Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) has spent the last 40 years trying to decipher them. In the process, WDP has accumulated decades of underwater audio and video documenting a single community of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas. In the process, they were able to correlate sounds with behavioral aspects such as courtship, unique names, and dolphin conflict.
Experts have been theorizing for a long time, and while humans may actually be able to communicate with the mediator, they lacked sufficient advances in technology to analyze and mimic the whistle, click, and burst pulses of species underwater. With the rise of large-scale language models (LLMS), researchers have recently wondered whether the same principles underlying LLM could be applied to dolphin interactions. To test this possibility, WDP recently partnered with Google and the Georgia Institute of Technology to provide engineers with a large labelled dataset of dolphin whistles, clicks and burst pulses for use in LLM training.
The results are as follows: IlfingenmaAn AI model built using the same technology that runs Google’s Gemini system. Dolphingemma is designed with around 400 million parameters to work in the same way as predicted LLMs like CHATGPT, but in the case of dolphins.
Dolphingemma first receives and interprets the audio input, then predicts subsequent sounds in the recreation. Next, we will partner with the chat system installed on the modified Google Pixel smartphone. Chats are not designed to translate dolphin natural languages perfectly, but they help humans communicate and establish a more simplified shared vocabulary. The plan is to ostensibly teach members of the WDP’s Atlantic Spotted Dolphin Community a series of synthetic whistles with their favorite objects, such as seagrass, salgassum, and even researcher scarves. Over time, experts hope that dolphins will even learn to request the desired item when they want to play.
There should still be much work done before humans and dolphins bridge the interspecies communication gap. However, with this creative use of LLMS, these underwater conversations are closer to another step.
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