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What are the chances of us being able to decode some of that in our life time? There must be some meaning to it, even if it's not as complex as human speech. W
by throwup238 2y ago
What are the chances of us being able to decode some of that in our life time? There must be some meaning to it, even if it's not as complex as human speech.
We should do it just to make sure they're not saying "so long and thanks for all the plankton."
- emmelaich 2y agoCould be just like that classic Gary Larson canine decoder cartoon.[0] Could be more musical. I hope / fear it's something more sophisticated. [0] https://twitter.com/Andr6wMale/status/1501487704399298560/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Andr6wMale/status/1501487704399298560/ph...
- yosito 2y ago> even if it's not as complex as human speech I wouldn't make that assumption. Just because whales don't have opposable thumbs and have a harder time making and using tools doesn't mean that their speech isn't advanced.
- baerrie 2y agoExtremely likely, especially with the increasing abilities of LLM to decode unknown languages. Then the test would be for us to produce these sounds and see if the whales respond as expected.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoYou would need some way to convert the whale LLM to human language though. Otherwise you would just be making pre trained GPT4 for whales. One option would be to label data according to induced reactions in whales to whale language completions (i.e., let the LLM complete whale language and use the reactions to try to induce some understanding. But it feels unlikely we would get further than providing a chatgpt for whales that only they can understand.
- famouswaffles 2y agoYou wouldn't necessarily need that. You don't actually need translated text for every single language pair a LLM will learn to translate. ie train a LLM on English, French, Spanish data. This data only contains parallel text in English-French. Can this LLM still translate to and from Spanish ? Yeah.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoYou still have a bridge and each of those languages are not just from the same species but the same language family. If there’s English to French and French to Spanish there’s a semantic relationship between English and Spanish. There exists no bridge to whale any more than there is aliens from Alpha Centauri.
- famouswaffles 2y agoCommon concepts are common, what species the language is in is not as relevant as you think. Text and Image space, two entirely different modalities are so related in high dimensional space, you can translate between them with just a simple linear projection layer.
- droopyEyelids 2y agoHow would we train the LLM to actually decode it though? Don't we need some way to weigh the results?
- TeMPOraL 2y agoMy guess: train a generative model to predict whale sounds, based on recordings of real ones, and hope that the resulting latent space will map to the one of a human-trained LLM. We'd need a stupidly large amount of recordings of whale songs, a tokenization scheme, and few already translated sounds/phrases to serve as starting points for mapping the latent spaces.
- baerrie 2y agoExactly. Also, I think an alternative to LLM that is more generally trained towards identifying large linguistic patterns across a language could be cross referenced with the aforementioned more standard llm to at least point to some possible meanings, patterns, etc
- dogcomplex 2y agoWe'd need contextual tracking of what the whales are actually doing/communicating to match to the songs. An LLM would be excellent at finding any correlated patterns between the language and actions, and then mapping those to similar English concepts, but that all requires the behavioral data too. Cameras strapped to whales maybe?
- wumbo 2y agoI unironically want this more than another particle collider.
- surfingdino 2y agoWe'd do it without its "help" and give it the results which it would then recombine and hallucinate.
- 2y ago
- darepublic 2y agoI dunno if sometimes the language would be contextual, and utterances could not be understood without taking into account the context of what is occurring, or the speaker. Yes I know human language can be subject to these variables too. Anyhow it's all speculation and the dream of talking to animals is surely exciting. Also, a Youtube doc about researchers attempting to teach dolphins english: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UziFw-jQSks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UziFw-jQSks
- BobbyTables2 2y agoImagine if they are communicating using a lot of pronouns. I can’t even understand some other people when they keep switching the target of the pronoun without being explicit. “He is tired. He dropped the ball on his foot. He yelled at him for being tired.” (How many people are here?)
- stubish 2y agoIn a language such as Thai, pronouns are left out in most cases, and only added when you need to disambiguate. No plurals either, requiring you to add this information with extra words when it matters. But nobody forces you to communicate effectively, or use Oxford commas.
- krisoft 2y ago> Imagine if they are communicating using a lot of pronouns. That's fine. The idea is to record them with lot of metadata in situ. Recording what is going on with the whales. (are they feeding? are they traveling? are they in a new location or somewhere they have been for a while? How many wales there are?) And also about their surrounding (sea state, surface weather, position and activity of boats, prey animals etc etc.)
- 082349872349872 2y agoI've heard that "da kine" in Hawai'i Creole English historically was, and still may be, used exactly in situations where the speakers share plenty of context, allowing them to figure out what it denotes, but leaving listeners largely unenlightened. compare "dude" in Fig. 1 of https://acephalous.typepad.com/79.3kiesling.pdf https://acephalous.typepad.com/79.3kiesling.pdf
- jjtheblunt 2y agoWhat increasing abilities of LLMs to decode unknown languages are you referencing? (I possibly missed a paper)
- mmmmmbop 2y agoSee e.g. here: https://ai.meta.com/research/no-language-left-behind/ https://ai.meta.com/research/no-language-left-behind/
- dotnet00 2y agoIf you scroll down, the very first step they describe is for collecting datasets of existing translations. They aren't translating even unknown human languages, let alone completely alien ones.
- DougBTX 2y agoNo idea of this is even vaguely in the right direction, but this comes to mind: Unsupervised speech-to-speech translation from monolingual data https://research.google/blog/unsupervised-speech-to-speech-translation-from-monolingual-data/ https://research.google/blog/unsupervised-speech-to-speech-t...
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoWe'll just fine tune our existing models with data scraped from the whale internet. Surely that will work.
- mocha_nate 2y agoNice. Probably just start with whale twitter and go from there
- baerrie 2y agoYou could train an llm on all existing whale sounds, get it to “listen” to live whales and respond with what it “thinks” it should, then do human analysis on the results, maybe find one shred of meaning, rinse and repeat.
- fluoridation 2y agoThat's literally impossible. Imagine trying to learn Japanese by talking to a Japanese man on the phone, with neither of you being able to understand or see each other or what you're each doing. Without shared context communication is impossible. Best case, you and the Japanese man would create a new context and a new shared language that would be neither English nor Japanese that would allow you to communicate about whatever ideas fit through the phone line. Maybe words like "sound", "word", "stop", etc.
- anakaine 2y agoImpossible in a single step, but perhaps impossible is too strong a word to reject the possibilities that arise when we consider how the statistics of words, or sounds are connected. If you can work out the statistical correlation between groups of sounds you can start to gain an idea of how they are interrelated. This is a stepping stone on the path to understanding.
- nimbleal 2y agoI could see that being possible with a human language, but a non-human language? No way near enough context, I'd think.
- eschaton 2y agoWhere do you get this idea that LLMs can be useful “to decode unknown languages” at all?
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoThere's an enormous gap between being able to "decode" it and actually understanding what it means. Wittgenstein's quote on lions is still relevant.
- currymj 2y agoa big part of the project is to not just collect whalesong data but also measure what activities the whales physically engage in as they “speak”.
- marci 2y agoTemba, his arms open. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
- canjobear 2y agoWittgenstein didn't present any evidence.
- gessha 2y agoReminds me of the Chinese room [1] argument: Does a computer really understand Chinese language if it can respond to Chinese inputs with Chinese outputs? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
- kubanczyk 2y agoIsn't a large company more handy model than a "Chinese room"? Hordes of these in practice own our species. They come up with the decisions on carbon footprint, on whether to colonize Mars, on where to shift collective attention. Although these entities are only one of achievements of our culture, for now they dominate on global level. Big achievement. "Consciousness" not strictly needed. Whatever the definition of "consciousness", a big company is driven by a glorified stack of excels and definitely couldn't write Chinese (assuming none of employees does, after Searle). So, running a planet and overriding any individual human is not enough, let's focus on entertaining an individual human with an interesting conversation in Chinese? What do you even seek with that model? /s
- 2y ago
- canjobear 2y agoThe topic paper is part of a big project called Project Ceti that's aiming to do just that. On the theoretical side for why it may be possible, see https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.11081 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.11081 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10931 https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.10931
- xattt 2y agoI am now anticipating some form of an existential crisis around whether animals that can talk via a specific language are any less entitled to rights than other humans.
- atrus 2y agoWe barely give certain humans rights, we'll have no issue ignoring the rights of animals
- dogcomplex 2y agoDon't worry, we've had a pretty pisspoor track record with fellow humans too. There's always room to turn it around
- hnbad 2y agoIt's always surprising to me when people seem to be unaware that things like human rights or international laws only exist as long as every authority (i.e. everyone with the power to enforce it with violence if necessary) agrees with them. The US literally passed a law allowing itself to invade The Hague if necessary to free any US service member brought before the International Court of Justice. Even the signatories of the UN human rights conventions could simply refuse to cooperate and experience no meaningful consequences. International laws are just treaties and treaties can be cancelled or revoked. Human rights are no more reliable than company mission statements. Not to mention that even on a national level laws only exist as limitations the state imposes on itself (or to chisel away at limitations it imposed on itself before). This is why it took the civil rights protests and literal terrorism to arrive at universal suffrage and civil rights for women and Black people. Of course this only works if the government would rather change its laws than escalate protests to a civil war and which one your government chooses might surprise you.