Press
Photo Mladina.
"Then, in December, Project CETI’s linguist, Gašper Beguš, Ph.D. ’18, took the understanding of [whale] click complexity further, revealing the presence of acoustic properties in codas that are analogous to the vowels and diphthongs in human speech."
Harvard Magazine
Press coverage
What AIs Teach Us about Language and Thought. Michael Shilo DeLay and Anastasia Bendebury at the Demystify Science podcast. February 2, 2025. Link
Animal Talk: Part 1. Wild Interest podcast (science for children). January 27, 2025. Link
Are Whales Trying to Tell Us Something? Serena Jampel at The Harvard Crimson. October 28, 2024. Link.
Out of our depth. Stephen Marché at Canadian Geographic. November 2024. Link
Decoding the deep. Jonathan Shaw at Harvard Magazine. June 13, 2024. Link
Tiersprache von Pottwalen ungeahnt raffiniert. Louis Polczynski at Bild (largest German newspaper). December 21, 2023. Link
Le casse-tête de l’intelligence artificielle. Clémentine Laurens at Epsiloon. Hors-série #11. July 2024.
Scientists Have Reported a Breakthrough In Understanding Whale Language. Jordan Pearson at Vice. December 7, 2023. Link
Feral Minds. John Last at the Noema Magazine. January 17, 2024. Link
How AI is decoding the animal kingdom. Persis Love, Irene de la Torre Arenas, Sam Learner and Sam Joiner at Financial Times. January 17. Link
Modeling How Species Speak: Gašper Beguš. Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Voices profile. February 22, 2024. Link
Computers are learning to read our minds. Ben Popper, Eira May, and Ryan Donovan for the Stack Overflow podcast. September 7, 2023. Link
Some Neural Networks Learn Language Like Humans. Steve Nadis at the Quanta Magazine. May 22, 2023. Link
Also in: Nautilus Magazine; Estadão (Brazilian newspaper of record)
How Humans Are Learning to Speak Whale. Sarah DeWeerdt at Atmos Magazine. June 6, 2023. Link
How artificial intelligence could help us talk to animals. Kathryn Hulick at the Science News Explores. August 17, 2023. Link
AI Is Unlocking the Human Brain’s Secrets. Matteo Wong at The Atlantic. May 26, 2023. Link
‘Raw’ data show AI signals mirror how the brain listens and learns. Jason Pohl at Berkeley News. May 1, 2023. link
A race to converse with, and save, the ocean’s brainiest eco-predators. Yasmin Anwar at Berkeley News. July 7, 2022. Link
Comment on a study (as a non-author). Scientists are starting to decode what sperm whales are saying. Mark Johnson at Washington Post. May 7, 2024. Link
AI’s New Conversation Skills Eyed for Education. Lauren Coffey at Inside Higher Ed. May 17, 2024. Link
UC Berkeley scientists study the language of whales. Cathy Whitman at KCBS. December 17, 2022. link
Sperm whale ‘clans’ in the Pacific mark out their culture with songs. Tom Metcalfe at NBC News, Sept 19, 2022. link
Sperm whale clans tell each other apart by their accents. Philip Kiefer at Popular Science, Sept 14, 2022. link
Dr. Beguš: Computational Linguistics, the Future of Generative AI and Oppenheimer. Podcast episode for the STARTS podcast on Spotify. Sep 2, 2023. link
Now, a study published last month suggests that natural and artificial networks learn in similar ways, at least when it comes to language. The researchers — led by Gašper Beguš, a computational linguist at the University of California, Berkeley — compared the brain waves of humans listening to a simple sound to the signal produced by a neural network analyzing the same sound. The results were uncannily alike. “To our knowledge,” Beguš and his colleagues wrote, the observed responses to the same stimulus “are the most similar brain and ANN signals reported thus far.”
Quanta Magazine
Photo STA Znanost
Other studies, like those led by Gašper Beguš at Berkeley, experimented with embodying AI to test their cognitive development under human-like conditions. By creating “artificial babies” that learn from speech alone, Beguš has found that language models develop with a similar neural architecture to our own, even learning the same way — through experimental babbling and nonsense words — that human children do. These discoveries, he argues, break down the idea that there can be some exceptionality to human language. “Not only, behaviorally, do they do similar things, they also process things in a similar way,” he told me.
Noema Magazine