🌟 What Are Dolphins Saying? Google's Model Tries to Find Out
Researchers from Google DeepMind and Georgia Tech created DolphinGemma, an AI model designed to help decode dolphins' "language."
Scientists have long observed that dolphins send signals to each other while playing, hunting, or traveling. Some believe that dolphins may even form full "sentences," which could suggest they have a simple form of language.
"If dolphins have language, then they probably also have culture," notes Thad Starner, a research scientist at Google DeepMind.
🐬 What Did Google Do?
To decode dolphin speech, Google DeepMind trained a model of about 400 million parameters based on Gemma architecture, using annotated dolphin recordings collected over 40 years by the Wild Dolphin Project.
The key innovation is SoundStream, a tool that turns dolphin sounds into tokens the model can understand. It listens to whistles and clicks and tries to predict what sound might come next. It works a lot like how LLMs autocomplete human sentences.
The model can generate dolphin-like responses, but we still don't know what those sounds mean. The main goal is to link sound patterns with dolphin behavior—and, eventually, decode their communication.
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