I work at Google on the Gemma team, and while not on the core team for this model, participated a bit on this project.

I personally was happy to see this project get built. The dolphin researchers have been doing great science for years, from the computational/mathematics side it was quite neat see how that was combined with the Gemma models.

Wow, there's a lot of cynicism in this thread, even for HN.

Regardless of whether or not it works perfectly, surely we can all relate to the childhood desire to 'speak' to animals at one point or another?

You can call it a waste of resources or someones desperate attempt at keeping their job if you want, but these are marine biologists. I imagine cross species communication would be a major achievement and seems like a worthwhile endeavor to me.

Not directly related, but one of those stories that is so bizarre you almost can't believe it isn't made up.

There was a NASA funded attempt to communicate with Dolphins. This eccentric scientist created a house that was half water (a series of connected pools) and half dry spaces. A woman named Margaret Howe Lovatt lived full-time with the Dolphins attempting to learn a shared language between them.

Things went completely off the rails in many, many ways. The lead scientist became obsessed with LSD and built an isolation chamber above the house. This was like the sensory deprivation tanks you get now (often called float tanks). He would take LSD and place himself in the tank and believed he was psychically communicating with the Dolphins.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolp...

This sounds very cool at a conceptual level, but the article left me in the dark about what they're actually doing with DolphinGemma. The closest to an answer is:

>By identifying recurring sound patterns, clusters and reliable sequences, the model can help researchers uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins' natural communication — a task previously requiring immense human effort.

But this doesn't really tell me anything. What does it mean to "help researchers uncover" this stuff? What is the model actually doing?

Tangential, but this brings up a really interesting question for me.

LLMs are multi-lingual without really trying assuming the languages in question are sufficiently well-represented in their training corpus.

I presume their ability to translate comes from the fact that there are lots of human-translated passages in their corpus; the same work in multiple languages, which lets them figure out the necessary mappings between semantic points (words.)

But I wonder about the translation capability of a model trained on multiple languages but with completely disjoint documents (no documents that were translations of another, no dictionaries, etc).

Could the emerging latent "concept space" of two completely different human languages be similar enough that the model could translate well, even without ever seeing examples of how a multilingual human would do a translation?

I don't have a strong intuition here but it seems plausible. And if so, that's remarkable because that's basically a science-fiction babelfish or universal translator.