Using Large Language Models to Speak to Dolphins

Denise Herzing is the founder and director of the Wild Dolphin Project. More than 40 years ago she started researching how dolphins communicate. Speaking at WIRED World Fair, she says that AI is finally allowing her to decipher what dolphins are saying.

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A lot of scientists are using various types of AI,

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to try to decode the sounds they have

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The large language model that we did

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was actually trained on our dolphin acoustic data.

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And so it was a generative AI model,

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which means I could prompt it by putting a sound in

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and it would predict what came next from our data.

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of how the dolphins might mimic a sound, for example.

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The Wild Dolphin Project was started to specifically observe

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and learn about a free-ranging resident group

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We track life history, individuals,

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we're on four generations of dolphins.

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and I wanted to observe their behavior,

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and see how complicated their communication system is.

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And that is the main goal of the Wild Dolphin Project.

Original source: https://www.wired.com/