Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. SPCE has announced his support for ProjectCETI, a research initiative that aims to leverage artificial intelligence, similar to ChatGPT, to facilitate communication with whales.
What Happened: Sperm whales, known for their sophisticated communication through echolocation and coded clicks, have long intrigued scientists.
A marine biologist, David Gruber's fascination with these creatures led to a groundbreaking idea: could AI, inspired by the likes of ChatGPT, decode the intricate language of sperm whales?
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This led to ProjectCETI, short for Cetacean Translation Initiative.
Led by a diverse team of experts, including marine biologist Gruber and Turing Award-winning computer scientist Shafi Goldwasser, the project aims to unlock the mysteries of whale communication.
On Thursday, Branson threw his weight behind this ambitious scientific endeavor.
In the article, shared by Branson, it was reported that the Dominica-based project plans to transform the island’s west coast into a massive whale-recording studio. It involves deploying an underwater network of microphones to capture whale codas, as well as attaching recording devices directly to the whales themselves.
ProjectCETI seeks to train machine-learning algorithms using this wealth of data, hoping to create a model capable of generating sequences of codas that whales would find convincing. Though it wouldn’t truly understand the whales’ language, this AI, dubbed “ClickGPT,” might speak it.
"Everybody's talking these days about these generative AI models like ChatGPT," said Goldwasser."What are they doing? You are giving them questions or prompts, and then they give you answers, and the way that they do that is by predicting how to complete sentences or what the next word would be."
"So you could say that's a goal for ceti—that you don't necessarily understand what the whales are saying, but that you could predict it with good success. And, therefore, you could maybe generate a conversation that would be understood by a whale, but maybe you don't understand it," she added.
The Challenge: The team currently faces a monumental task, aiming to gather a dataset roughly forty thousand times larger than the current archive of sperm whale codas. The potential to communicate with these intelligent creatures is an open question that has previously sparked debates about the very nature of language.
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