The week in AI: dolphins, robots, deepfakes and OpenAI's smartest models yet

It's been another whirlwind week in AI development with breakthroughs that range from the practical to the downright mind-bending. From communication with dolphins to marathon-running robots, here's a breakdown of the most significant AI developments that caught my attention.

Google's Dolphin Gemma: AI-powered animal communication

Google has developed "Dolphin Gemma," a lightweight AI model designed to analyze and potentially communicate with dolphins. The system can run on a smartphone and process dolphin vocalizations in real-time, including whistles, clicks, and buzzes.

What makes this particularly interesting is that Dolphin Gemma can not only identify patterns in dolphin sounds but also generate new sounds in "dolphin language." The model was trained using Google's Soundstream technology, which converts audio into tokens similar to how text prompts are processed by language models.

At just 400 million parameters, it's compact enough to run on a Google Pixel phone. Google plans to open-source the model this summer, potentially allowing researchers to adapt it for other animal species. While we may not have AGI yet, the ability to communicate with other species could be a genuinely revolutionary application of AI.

Character animation breakthroughs

Two new tools are making waves in the character animation space:

Uni Animate DIT is a plugin for the open-source video generator One 2.1 that allows you to animate any photo using reference pose videos. It works by transferring motion from a reference video to your character, handling everything from basic movements to complex finger gestures. The tool supports both realistic photos and stylized characters, even generating plausible views of parts of characters not visible in the original image. It requires 14GB of VRAM to run.

Instant Character by Tencent lets you add reference characters to your images with remarkable fidelity. Using Flux as its base model, it can transfer characters to new scenes while preserving their appearance with impressive accuracy. In comparison tests with GPT-4o and other tools, Instant Character provided the most accurate character transfers. It's available as a free Hugging Face demo, with instructions for local installation also available.