Gasper Begus
@begus
Assoc. Professor at UC Berkeley Artificial and biological intelligence and language Linguistics Lead at Project CETI 🐳 PI Berkeley Biological and Artificial Language Lab 🗣️ College Principal of Bowles Hall 🏰
Since Aristotle, literary theory has studied texts and reception. We propose a new object of literary study: the latent spaces of an AI model trained on a single text. We call the method latent reading and apply it to the first case study: FinneganLM, trained on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
New technology can help us listen to the ocean. Yesterday we deployed an automatic glider that will record our whales for up to 30 days. Humbling to experience the vastness of whales’ lives.
It can do so again by making us rethink the position of human and language in the natural world.
Linguistics is a powerful science that has the capacity to change the course of history (like it did when Darwin borrowed from linguistics to argue for his evolutionary theory).
Aristotle wrote that dolphins have voice (which requires imagination and soul), but not complex sounds. I'll be arguing that cetaceans have much more complex sounds than what we used to believe.
Very excited to give a keynote talk at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) later today. I'll be talking about a new reframing of language and how some long held beliefs are being challenged by AI and new advances in understanding animals.
The one thing LLMs couldn’t do so far was write hymns in the correct Sanskrit meter. Until now.
Whales use vowels differently when ships are around. First glimpse at vowels being meaningful in whales too.
Science is reporting on our work today. We discuss advances in AI creativity, its limits, metalinguistics, consciousness, and the importance of linguistic research. Also, try out ConlangCrafter, an agentic pipeline for creating constructed languages. www.science.org/content/arti...
Marine linguistics is a thing! I talk about doing linguistics on whales, what this means for legal rights of animals, and about understanding AI. aiandyou.net/e/316-guest-...
Studying ancient languages such as Sanskrit or Hittite is like time travel. You try to enter the minds and worlds of people who lived four thousand years ago.
Wittgenstein famously said that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. This research is using AI to generate endless made-up languages to challenge the limits of possible languages and worlds.
Thanks to B. Scot Rousse for referencing my commencement speech in his great piece! open.substack.com/pub/begus/p/...
122 years after the first Bloomsday a model that learns language like humans is trained on Finnegans Wake and starts imagitating new sentences at the border between language and prelanguage. @ninabegus.bsky.social @metahaven.bsky.social latentspacecraft.antikythera.org
The next big thing is studying the sociology of AI models. Very excited to be a keynote speaker at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science in Burlington, Vermont on July 28-31, 2026. Check out the amazing program.
After 10+ years of fieldwork, experiments, and analysis, the paper is finally out. The paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.wo... The whale paper: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...
This beautiful dialect of Slovenian has one of the most intriguing tone systems. One pattern, low-mid vowels resisting retracted stress, is strikingly reminiscent of something we've found in whale phonology. Tone, stress, quantity, and quality interact, which is very rare.
This fabulous book, The Hard Question of Art by @metahaven.bsky.social is available for preorder! Coming out in August. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/775582...
In this moment, when humanity is realizing that its intelligence might not be the most exclusive and unique, it is worth forming our alliances with other biological beings. Perhaps it’s time to start learning not only from other humans, but from other species as well. It is time to listen deeply
There are many things meaningful to us humans that whales never see. There are no trees and no ground in their world. But the opposite is also true. There are things in their lives that we cannot even imagine. As you go out in the world, search for those unimaginable things.
If a syllabus doesn't contain a quote in a non-latin alphabet, it's not a syllabus. Aristotle should have been in Greek!
A beautiful article on whale vowels in a Danish newspaper of record @politiken.dk
With the legend, the originator of Klingon who gave an amazing address to our graduates.