There are scientists who use AI to understand the sounds that dolphins make, and they could have an impact on changing the world.
“I like to think I can talk to animals at some point,” Drew Purves, the nature lead of Google Deepmind, said in a recent episode of the company’s podcast.
AI Research Lab is already working on this through Dolphingemma. This is called a “large-scale language model that helps scientists study dolphin communication using dolphin audio.”
Collaborative projects Field researchers from Georgia Tech and wild dolphin projects are Signals used by dolphins To communicate Generates sounds to communicate.
“It takes sounds, separates them, tokenize them, and essentially brings it to the world of large-scale language modeling,” Purves says. “This is an example of how AI is actively used to study animal communication at a level that it has not been able to do before.”
These types of large-scale language models can have a significant impact on the collective knowledge of the world, Purves said. “As we just said, most of what we’re doing now is to fill in gaps in known information,” he said. “Sometimes, you think that in the long run, real change comes from these moments of awakening, from the moment people can change their relationship with nature almost overnight.”
This kind of work has been underway for years. The Earth Species Project, a nonprofit founded in 2017, uses AI to decode non-human communication. Its flagship model, Naturelm-Audio, is the “world’s first large-scale audio language model for animal sounds,” and its website aims to help researchers detect and classify species and recognize new species’ sounds.
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One thing the nonprofit has already learned from its research is that at last year’s Axios AI+ SF Summit, many of the animals (elephants, grey parrots, malmosets) of the Earth Species Project, all have names from each other.
The vision uses that technology to “reconnect humans with the rest of nature in a way that all diversity in the species flourishes, not only accelerating and exacerbating the existing challenges we face where we are extracting, but we tame them.
And when it is all said and done, humans may no longer be at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom.
“We saw the universe and discovered that Earth wasn’t the center,” Aza Ruskin, co-founder and president of the Earth Species Project, told Scientific American. “These tools will change the way we see ourselves in relation to everything.”
