Latest news with #DolphinGemma
Perth Now
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Adorable video shows dolphins helping to clear up plastic
In an incredible display of intelligence, the moment that a pod of dolphins in the Bahamas seemingly helped a woman pick up plastic cups from the ocean has been captured in a TikTok video. The woman is sat on a pier and films the moment that a dolphin retrieves a plastic cup that she accidentally dropped in the sea. 'You guys are so nice . . . thank you. I dropped the cups. He's trying to give it to me' she said as she films a dolphin pick up the cup in its mouth. She reaches to try and grab the plastic cup from its mouth but can't quite reach, so then tries to retrieve the plastic with a net but still can't get it. The dolphin then resurfaces again with the cup in its mouth and comes far enough out of the water for her to grab it. If you'd like to view this content, please adjust your . To find out more about how we use cookies, please see our Cookie Guide. 'Oh thank you . . . you're so sweet' she said after she safely retrieved the plastic cup. The video quickly went viral on TikTok, amassing two million views and was flooded with comments from people who were amazed by the dolphin behaviour. 'He looked so proud of himself when you grabbed it 🥺' one person said. 'Dolphin: 'Ma'am please take your garbage back' 🤣' another commented. The video shows the dolphin picking up the plastic, returning it to the woman, then looking 'proud' afterwards according to one of the comments. Credit: TikTok Dolphins are renowned for their intelligence, so much so that Google are developing an AI model that can communicate with these marine mammals. 'In collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology and the nonprofit Wild Dolphin Project, Google has announced progress on what the team has as the first large language model for dolphin vocalizations, called DolphinGemma,' Scientific American announced in March 2025. In Western Australia, there was recently an incredible wildlife spectacle in Koombana Bay involving dolphins, when a pod seemed to guide a young humpback whale that was lost back out to sea. 'The dolphins took over and while playing and interacting with each other they slowly guided their large cousin out of the bay towards the deeper waters of Geographe Bay' The Dolphin Discovery Centre said.
Time of India
01-07-2025
- Science
- Time of India
What are animals saying? 3 AI tools that could soon tell us their thoughts
Efforts to decode animal communication using artificial intelligence are gaining momentum, with researchers worldwide working on projects that could one day allow humans to communicate directly with other species. From dolphins and whales to elephants and parrots, scientists are using advanced AI tools to uncover the complex ways animals convey meaning through sound. Decoding Dolphin Language with AI At the forefront of this research is Google DeepMind 's project DolphinGemma, which uses a large language model trained on decades of dolphin audio. Developed in collaboration with Georgia Tech and the Wild Dolphin Project, the tool is designed to break down dolphin vocalizations, segment the sounds, and process them similarly to how human languages are analyzed. According to Drew Purves, who leads nature-related AI projects at DeepMind, this approach allows scientists to examine dolphin communication at an unprecedented scale and depth. The goal is to not only understand how dolphins talk to each other but also to possibly recreate similar sounds and communicate back. The idea of interspecies conversation, once a far-off concept, is now being explored with tangible results. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like War Thunder - Register now for free and play against over 75 Million real Players War Thunder Play Now Undo Earth Species Project: Beyond Dolphins Another major initiative is the Earth Species Project, a nonprofit founded in 2017 that aims to decode the communication systems of non-human species using AI. Their flagship model, NatureLM-audio, is described as the first large-scale audio-language model built specifically for animal sounds. Through this, researchers have uncovered surprising findings—such as the fact that some animals, including elephants and parrots, seem to have individual names for one another. Co-founder Katie Zacarian emphasized that the objective is not domination or control, but rather a shift in how humans relate to the natural world. Instead of exploiting or subduing nature, the goal is to foster understanding and coexistence across species. Project CETI and the Whale Language Challenge Meanwhile, Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) is focused on the vocal patterns of sperm whales. These animals use 'codas'—brief, rapid clicks—in structured sequences, similar to syntax in human language. Using AI to interpret these codas, researchers have found signs of turn-taking in conversations and potentially even distinct dialects. CETI has isolated specific sounds that may act as punctuation marks in whale speech. They hope to have a rudimentary understanding of whale communication by 2026. This work draws parallels to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, as both fields involve decoding unknown languages. In fact, SETI scientists were part of a team that recorded an acoustic exchange with a humpback whale named Twain, which involved back-and-forth calls over a 20-minute period. Limits and Implications of Interspecies Communication While AI has opened new doors, the limits of language go beyond sound. Many species use a combination of visual, chemical, and mechanical signals that humans do not perceive in the same way. For animals like dolphins, which rely on echolocation, sound is also a visual experience. German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll's concept of umwelt—an animal's unique perceptual world—illustrates how challenging true translation might be. This raises philosophical questions: if we could talk to animals, would they still be the same creatures? As theorist Stephen Budiansky once noted, understanding a lion through language might strip away what makes it a lion. Listening to the Living World Even without perfect translation, animals are already communicating their experiences—especially the impacts of human activity. Healthy ecosystems are full of natural sounds, while damaged ones fall silent. Noise pollution, largely from shipping and underwater mining, has steadily increased since the 1960s. Humpback whales, for instance, often stop singing when near commercial vessels, losing a vital tool for migration and mating. Their songs, which evolve over time and span oceans, demonstrate a different understanding of space and time. Speaking whale, then, may not just be about words—it could reshape how we think about our environment and ourselves. The promise of AI-facilitated interspecies communication is not merely a scientific curiosity. It could redefine humanity's place in the natural world, much like the realization that Earth is not the center of the universe. Whether through dolphins, whales, or parrots, these emerging tools may one day allow us to listen—and respond—in ways we never thought possible.
Business Insider
30-06-2025
- Science
- Business Insider
AI is learning how animals talk to each other, and could someday help humans talk to animals
There are scientists out there who are using AI to understand the sounds dolphins make, and it could have some world-changing impacts. "I like to think that we will be able to talk to animals at some point," Drew Purves, the nature lead at Google DeepMind, said on a recent episode of the company's podcast. The AI research lab has already been working on this through DolphinGemma, which it calls a "large language model that uses dolphin audio to help scientists study how dolphins communicate." The project, conducted in collaboration with Georgia Tech researchers and the field research of the Wild Dolphin Project, aims to decode the signals dolphins use to communicate and generate sounds to communicate back. "It takes the sounds, separates them out, tokenizes them, and basically brings it into the world of large language modeling," Purves said. "That's an example of AI actively being used to study animal communication at a level we really couldn't do before." These types of large language models could have a substantial impact on the collective knowledge of the world, Purves said. "Most of what we're doing at the moment, as I mentioned, is filling known information gaps," he said. "Sometimes, you think that the real change can come, in the long run, from these, these moments of awakening, where people almost overnight can change their relationship with nature." Work like this 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 audio-language model for animal sounds" and aims to help researchers detect and classify species and even recognize the sounds of new species, according to its website. One of the things the nonprofit has already learned in its research is that many species of animals — elephants, gray parrots, marmosets — all have names for each other, Katie Zacarian, the cofounder and CEO of the Earth Species Project, said at the Axios AI+ SF Summit last year. The vision is to use its technology to "reconnect human beings with the rest of nature in a way that all the diversity of species can thrive and not just accelerate and exacerbate the existing challenges that we're faced with where we're extracting, we're taming, we're exploiting the rest of nature — that's not the goal here," Zacarian said. And when it's all said and done, humans may no longer be at the top of the animal kingdom. "We looked out at the universe and discovered that Earth was not the center," Aza Raskin, cofounder and president of the Earth Species Project, told Scientific American. "These tools are going to change the way that we see ourselves in relation to everything."
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
We're close to translating animal languages – what happens then?
Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors' first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won't be long before we join the conversation once again. The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy. Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026. The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals' interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another's native vocabulary. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic 'conversation' with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as 'whup/throp' with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U. But in the excitement we should not ignore the fact that other species are already bearing eloquent witness to our impact on the natural world. A living planet is a loud one. Healthy coral reefs pop and crackle with life. But soundscapes can decay just as ecosystems can. Degraded reefs are hushed deserts. Since the 1960s, shipping and mining have raised background noise in the oceans by about three decibels a decade. Humpback whale song occupies the same low-frequency bandwidth as deep-sea dredging and drilling for the rare earths that are vital for electronic devices. Ironically, mining the minerals we need to communicate cancels out whales' voices. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours. 'Song' is apt: they seem to include rhymed phrases, and their compositions travel the oceans with them, evolving as they go in a process called 'song revolutions', where a new cycle replaces the old. (Imagine if Nina Simone or the Beatles had erased their back catalogue with every new release.) They're crucial to migration and breeding seasons. But in today's louder soundscape, whale song is crowded out of its habitual bandwidth and even driven to silence – from up to 1.2 km away from commercial ships, humpback whales will cease singing rather than compete with the noise. In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually? The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal's umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? 'If a lion could talk,' writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein's famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, 'we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.' We should ask, then, how speaking with other beings might change us. Talking to another species might be very like talking to alien life. It's no coincidence that Ceti echoes Nasa's Seti – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – Institute. In fact, a Seti team recorded the whup/throp exchange, on the basis that learning to speak with whales may help us if we ever meet intelligent extraterrestrials. In Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, whale-like aliens communicate via a script in which the distinction between past, present and future times collapses. For Louise, the linguist who translates the script, learning Heptapod lifts her mind out of linear time and into a reality in which her own past and future are equally available. The film mentions Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic determinism – the idea that our experience of reality is encoded in language – to explain this. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was dismissed in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there may be some truth to it. Pormpuraaw speakers in northern Australia refer to time moving from east to west, rather than forwards or backwards as in English, making time indivisible from the relationship between their body and the land. Whale songs are born from an experience of time that is radically different to ours. Humpbacks can project their voices over miles of open water; their songs span the widest oceans. Imagine the swell of oceanic feeling on which such sounds are borne. Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we'd think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly. Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us. • David Farrier is the author of Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet (Canongate). Why Animals Talk by Arik Kershenbaum (Viking, £10.99) Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wiley-Blackwell, £24.95) An Immense World by Ed Yong (Vintage, £12.99)
The Guardian
01-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
We're close to translating animal languages – what happens then?
Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors' first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won't be long before we join the conversation once again. The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy. Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026. The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals' interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another's native vocabulary. The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic 'conversation' with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as 'whup/throp' with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U. But in the excitement we should not ignore the fact that other species are already bearing eloquent witness to our impact on the natural world. A living planet is a loud one. Healthy coral reefs pop and crackle with life. But soundscapes can decay just as ecosystems can. Degraded reefs are hushed deserts. Since the 1960s, shipping and mining have raised background noise in the oceans by about three decibels a decade. Humpback whale song occupies the same low-frequency bandwidth as deep-sea dredging and drilling for the rare earths that are vital for electronic devices. Ironically, mining the minerals we need to communicate cancels out whales' voices. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours. 'Song' is apt: they seem to include rhymed phrases, and their compositions travel the oceans with them, evolving as they go in a process called 'song revolutions', where a new cycle replaces the old. (Imagine if Nina Simone or the Beatles had erased their back catalogue with every new release.) They're crucial to migration and breeding seasons. But in today's louder soundscape, whale song is crowded out of its habitual bandwidth and even driven to silence – from up to 1.2 km away from commercial ships, humpback whales will cease singing rather than compete with the noise. In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually? The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal's umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? 'If a lion could talk,' writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein's famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, 'we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.' We should ask, then, how speaking with other beings might change us. Talking to another species might be very like talking to alien life. It's no coincidence that Ceti echoes Nasa's Seti – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – Institute. In fact, a Seti team recorded the whup/throp exchange, on the basis that learning to speak with whales may help us if we ever meet intelligent extraterrestrials. In Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, whale-like aliens communicate via a script in which the distinction between past, present and future times collapses. For Louise, the linguist who translates the script, learning Heptapod lifts her mind out of linear time and into a reality in which her own past and future are equally available. The film mentions Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic determinism – the idea that our experience of reality is encoded in language – to explain this. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was dismissed in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there may be some truth to it. Pormpuraaw speakers in northern Australia refer to time moving from east to west, rather than forwards or backwards as in English, making time indivisible from the relationship between their body and the land. Whale songs are born from an experience of time that is radically different to ours. Humpbacks can project their voices over miles of open water; their songs span the widest oceans. Imagine the swell of oceanic feeling on which such sounds are borne. Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we'd think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us. David Farrier is the author of Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet (Canongate). Why Animals Talk by Arik Kershenbaum (Viking, £10.99) Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wiley-Blackwell, £24.95) An Immense World by Ed Yong (Vintage, £12.99)
