technology

What the dolphins are asking for:

The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method,[2] such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge.

[...] Historian Philip Mirowski argues that the decline of scientific quality can be connected to its commodification, especially spurred by major corporations' profit-driven decision to outsource their research to universities and contract research organizations.

Publication bias. In theory, rejection of the null hypothesis should elevate confidence that observed effects are real and repeatable. But concerns about the dichotomous interpretation of NHST as ‘significant’ or not have been raised for almost 60 years. Many of these concerns stem from a troublesome publication bias in which papers that reject the null hypothesis are accepted for publication at a much higher rate than those that do not. Demonstrating this effect, Sterling analyzed 362 papers published in major psychology journals between 1955 and 1956, noting that 97.3% of papers that used NHST rejected the null hypothesis.

The high publication rates for papers that reject the null hypothesis contributes to a file drawer effect in which papers that fail to reject the null go unpublished because they are not written up, written up but not submitted, or submitted and rejected. Publication bias and the file drawer effect combine to propagate the dissemination and maintenance of false knowledge: through the file drawer effect, correct findings of no effect are unpublished and hidden from view; and through publication bias, a single incorrect chance finding (a 1:20 chance at α = .05, if the null hypothesis is true) can be published and become part of a discipline’s wrong knowledge.

Ideally, scientists are objective and dispassionate throughout their investigations, but knowledge of the publication bias strongly opposes these ideals. Publication success shapes careers, so researchers need their experiments to succeed (rejecting the null in order to get published), creating many areas of concern (middle row of Figure 1), as follows.

I'm so tired. I hate Googler Science.

This is bullshit hype nonsense, and the fact it devolves into an ad for "AI-powered" Pixel 9 is pretty telling.

This is still less shit than their arxiv "GenAI Game Engine" crap, but not by much.

Back in the day we had regular humans who would talk to dolphins and only occasionally engage in cross-species intercourse

"Finally I can get consent!"

Turns out Dolphins really hate black people.

This conclusion was brought to you by Grok.

. It's an audio-in, audio-out model. So after providing it with a dolphin vocalization, the model does just what human-centric language models do—it predicts the next token. If it works anything like a standard LLM, those predicted tokens could be sounds that a dolphin would understand.

It's a cool tech application, but all they're technically doing right now is training an AI to sound like dolphins.. Unless they can somehow convert this to actual meaning/human language, I feel like we're just going to end up with an equally incomprehensible Large Dolphin Language Model.

I don't know if we really want to talk to dolphins. Those things are godless.

I see a major problem with this. Why would we assume dolphins have one single language? I see no reason to assume their languages wouldn't be as diverse as ours.

But worse still, you have to factor in the decline in dolphin populations over time. Maybe at their natural numbers, there would have be many thousands of dolphin languages, each spoken by tens of thousands of dolphins. But we've severely degraded their numbers. Now each dolphin language is the equivalent of one of those dying indigenous languages that now only has a handful of living speakers. Dolphin language might be a collection of such near-extinct languages, each highly distinct from each other. Maybe there's thousands of dolphin languages, each spoken by only a few dozen dolphins.

And unlike human languages, these dolphin languages weren't replaced by some broader hegemonic dolphin language, a dolphin English, Spanish, Mandarin, etc. There is no dolphin lingua franca that we can train the model on. There's just a whole series of dolphin language remnants, mutually incomprehensible to each other.

This is a real problem because LLMs require vast quantities of data to train on. It may simply not be possible to gather enough samples of a single dolphin language sufficient in quantity to train an LLM on.

So a research team did this recently with a sperm whale I believe and they basically said 'hello come here' and it actually did and circled the ship trying to talk with it, but they didn't know enough yet to respond.

Ok yeah if tech bros find a way to communicate with animals, I will have no choice but to concede

I’m kinda skeptical though, this seems like more hype

turns out dolphins mostly just talk about fish and all the sa they have done, are doing, and plan to do

So long and thanks for all the fish!

Ok this would actually be pretty cool, if it works

We have a dolphin LLM at home

Is ecco the dolphin going to time travel into the future and save the human race?

they're gonna love Shrimp Jesus

lol what do you expect them to say? “Golly thanks for destroying the biosphere. Im so glad the ocean is spanned with floating garbage and commercial nets, there used to be pesky fish everywhere!”