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holy shit

A practical guide to assessing bear attack risk

ok this is the most awesome project i've ever seen in AI: a startup called Earth Species Project is teaching AI to understand and talk with animals there's 8 million species on Earth, yet we can fully understand just one of them: us humans. but the founders think AI is the first tool powerful enough to close that gap so they built NatureLM-audio, the first large language model trained on animal sound instead of human text instead of training from scratch, they took a model that already understands human audio and fine-tuned it on animal recordings (birds, whales, primates, etc) the bet was that the patterns AI learns from human speech would carry over to animals and it worked better than they expected. the model started doing things nobody trained it to do, like: - counting how many animals are in a recording - telling distress calls apart from friendly ones - identifying species it had never heard before it's the same emergent behavior we saw when language models got big enough to surprise their own builders, except pointed at the animal kingdom a few of the (amazing) breakthroughs they've had: 1. they solved the "cocktail party problem" for animals. the AI can pull one individual voice out of a noisy group recording, like isolating a single sperm whale's clicks from the whole pod 2. they tagged wild crows with tiny recorders, captured 127,000 calls, including the quiet murmurs between family members that normal microphones never pick up. the model can even tell an adult's call from a chick's. a whole layer of crow conversation we couldn't record before is now on tape 3. most of their work is the AI learning to listen. but with zebra finches, they've started generating brand new synthetic calls and playing them back, which is the first real step from understanding animals toward actually TALKING to them what makes it particularly meaningful is that it feeds straight into conservation > with the Hawaiian crow (nearly extinct, only a few hundred left) understanding their calls helps researchers decide which birds to breed together and where to release them. > with whales, mapping their songs shows exactly how ship noise drowns out their communication, which tells you how to reroute ships so you stop killing them and they're open-sourcing all of it, so any researcher can build on top we might actually find out what the animals have been saying this whole time