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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 t
by ZeroCool2u 2y ago
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.
- davedigerati 2y agoI for one am simply happy to see us trying to apply LLMs to something other than replacing call centers... humankind SHOULD be exploring and learning sometimes even when there isn't an ROI.
- morkalork 2y agoI'd be less cynnical if researchers hadn't announced the same thing like 10 years ago https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/science/dolphins-machine-learning-algorithm.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/science/dolphins-machine-...
- canyon289 2y agoAh this is different. The Nytimes article is about identifying/classifying dolphins from audio. This new model is about communicating with dolphins from generated audio. The difference between recognizing someone from hearing them, and actually talking to them!
- garciasn 2y agoGemini supposedly allows for conversational speech w/your data. Have you tried it? We have; it's laughably bad and can't get the most basic stuff right from a well-crafted datamart. If it can't do the most basic stuff, please explain to be how in the fuck it is going to understand dolphin language and why would should believe its results anyway?
- groby_b 2y ago"We couldn't make something work, so nobody can make anything work" is also a claim you can make, yes. It's rather unsound reasoning, but you certainly can.
- garciasn 2y agoOh I can make it work; but it’s definitely not as easy as they claim for business users and that was my point.
- waldohatesyou 2y agoThey have sufficient control over their model that they can presumably tailor it to their needs. Perhaps if you acquired analogous control, you’d have more success.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- janalsncm 2y agoDon’t understand the cynicism either. Is this not way cooler than the latest pre-revenue series F marketing copy slop bot startup? To me this task looks less like next token prediction language modeling and more like translating a single “word” at a time into English. It’s a pretty tractable problem. The harder parts probably come from all the messiness of hearing and playing sounds underwater. I would imagine adapting to new vocab would be pretty clunky in an LLM based system. It would be interesting if it were able to add new words in real time.
- amarant 2y agoIt's trendy to hate Google, and even more trendy to hate anything AI. The cynicism on display here is little more than virtue signalling and/or upvote farming. Sad to see such thoughtless behaviour has reached even this bastion of reason.
- lotyrin 2y ago"virtue signalling" really is one of those words/turns of phrase that needs to be put on a high shelf. Plenty of people genuinely dislike the concentration of economic and computing power that big tech represents. Them expressing this is not "virtue signaling", it is an authentic moral position they hold. Plenty of people genuinely dislike the disregard for labor and intellectual property rights that anything Gen AI represents. Again, an authentic moral position. "Virtue signaling" is for example, when a corporate entity doesn't authentically support diversity through any kind of consequential action but does make sure to sponsor the local pride event (in exchange for their logo being everywhere) and swaps their social media logos to rainbow versions.
- vlovich123 2y agoI believe it meets the definition of virtue signaling to express a position you don’t do anything to advocate - which is the vast majority of opinions expressed on the Internet. It can be a sincerely held belief but if you’re not taking action around it I don’t see any difference from the corporate example you gave.
- nfw2 2y agoYour statement is virtue signaling according to its own definition unless you've taken action to prevent people complaining about Google.
- vlovich123 2y agoDid I say anything about people complaining about Google? I think you misread or misinterpreted what I wrote.
- Nifty3929 2y agoI'm as or more cynical than the next guy - but it seems to me that being able to communicate with animals has high utility for humans. Partly from an emotional or companionship perspective as we've been doing with dogs for a long time, but maybe even on purely utilitarian grounds. If we want to know something about what's going on in the ocean, or high on a mountain or in the sky or whatever - what if we can just ask some animals about it? What about for things that animals can naturally perceive that humans have trouble with - certain wavelengths of light or magnetic fields for example? How about being able to recruit animals to do specific tasks that they are better suited for? Seems like a win for us, and maybe a win for them as well. Not sure what else, but history suggests that the more people have been able to communicate with each other, the better the outcomes. I assume this holds true more broadly as well.
- doublerabbit 2y agoI am all for the Disney utopian fantasy of us living with animals. However if universal communication was to be made. Don't you think that animals are going to be pretty pissed to discover what we have done with their kingdom? "Hi Mr Dolphin, how's the sea today?" "Wet and a plastic bottle cap got lodged in my blowhole last night..."
- lesuorac 2y agoI suspect Dolphins can tell people apart and will recognize you as not the guy that threw the bottle cap akin to all those stories about crows. Certainly will be interesting to see how much we can bribe Dolphins to do once we have faster communication methods.
- 9dev 2y agoSo you think you’re not responsible for the fucked-up oceans because you let other people throw your trash into the sea for you, and the organically farmed salmon you eat surely wasn’t produced under atrocious conditions?
- 2y ago
- lukev 2y agoIt's not even about the communication! Just having more insight into the brains and communication of other mammals has a ton of scientific value in its own right. Sometimes it's good just to know things. If we needed to find a practical justification for everything before we started exploring it, we'd still be animals.
- j45 2y agoThe ability to understanding bee's communication was made possible, so I'm not sure why dolphins would seem harder?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nsonha 2y agoChildhood dream aside, this to me seems like a much more legit use of AI than, say, generative art, so lame and pointless.