Some folks reckon dolphins are as smart as humans. We reckon they’re smarter. They get to spend all day at the ocean. DolphinGemma, a new AI project from the friendlier depths of the rotting husk of Google, hopes to settle the question once and for all.
How? By asking the dolphins, obviously. Researchers haven’t considered what to do if it turns out these aquatic mammals are colossal liars, but DolphinGemma could let us find out what they’re saying — even if it isn’t true.
Decoding DolphinGemma
If it were earlier in April, we’d suspect that this AI project was some cunning joke, but humans have indeed attempted to communicate with dolphins for decades. Google, Georgia Tech, and the Wild Dolphin Project believe they have the tools to make this dream a reality.
DolphinGemma is a specific tool Google has crafted for this situation, a custom version of its SoundStream tokenizer that processes the reams of auditory data its partners have collected over the years. There’s also Gemma, the open AI model formed from the search giant’s own Gemini artificial intelligence.
“Trained extensively on WDP’s acoustic database of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins, DolphinGemma functions as an audio-in, audio-out model, processes sequences of natural dolphin sounds to identify patterns, structure and ultimately predict the likely subsequent sounds in a sequence, much like how large language models for human language predict the next word or token in a sentence.”
It’s important to note that this new communication tool hasn’t made any headway yet. It’s set to be deployed during the Wild Dolphin Project’s outings this year — the model is small enough to run on Google’s Pixel phones — and is expected to help “uncover hidden structures and potential meanings within the dolphins’ natural communication.”
“Eventually, these patterns, augmented with synthetic sounds created by the researchers to refer to objects with which the dolphins like to play, may establish a shared vocabulary with the dolphins for interactive communication.”
It’s also important to note that this probably won’t result in a new Cetean language option in Google Translate. Even Google, noted pusher of the importance of AI (whether you like it or not), reckons DolphinGemma will only move humans closer to understanding its aquatic cousin. We’re unlikely to start having full-on conversations in the near future. Just as well. We’ve heard that dolphins are all liars.
