Humanity is one step away from communicating with dolphins
Dolphins are among the most intelligent and sociable animals on Earth, and now it appears that scientists have found a way to communicate with them.
A new large language model of an AI system could soon allow humans to communicate with dolphins, with the technology set to be unveiled in the coming months, reports Popular Science.
The new language model is called DolphinGemma, and its companion system is called Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry (CHAT).
The language models are expected to debut in the coming months after scientists conduct tests to see if the new technology can translate and mimic some of the most complex mammal vocalizations. If successful, the scientists’ work could be the culmination of more than four decades of work, documentation, and conservation efforts.
The project, carried out by scientists from the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), has spanned the last 40 years. During the study, the team collected underwater audio and video footage documenting a community of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas.
As a result, the scientists were able to match the sounds with behavioral aspects such as courtship, unique names, and even squabbles.
It should be noted that the idea of communication between humans and cetaceans has been around for a long time, but scientists simply did not have advanced enough technology to analyze and simulate the underwater whistles, clicks and pulse flashes of this species.
But that all changed with the advent of large-scale language models (LLMs), which made the scientists curious to see if the same principles could be applied to dolphin interactions.
To test this possibility, the team teamed up with Google and the Georgia Institute of Technology, giving the engineers a huge, labeled dataset of dolphin whistles, clicks, and pulse bursts to use in training the LLMs.
The result is a new computer model of artificial intelligence that uses the same technology that powers Google’s Gemini systems. DolphinGemma is designed with about 400 million parameters to function essentially like predictive LLMs like ChatGPT, but for dolphins.
According to the scientists, DolphinGemma receives and interprets audio inputs, and then predicts likely subsequent sounds for entertainment.
The technology then interacts with the CHAT system installed on modified Google Pixel smartphones. Note that the system is not designed to fully translate “dolphin language”, but helps people transmit and install a simplified mammalian vocabulary.
Essentially, the plan is to supposedly teach members of the WDP’s Atlantic spotted dolphin community a series of synthetic whistles featuring their favorite objects, such as sea grass, sargassum, and even the researchers’ scarves. Over time, experts hope the dolphins will even learn to ask for the desired items when they want to play.
