I'm really excited to see where ML takes us in cetacean linguistic research. I don't know if it will successfully translate whale song, but we'll learn a whole lot by trying.
Whale song is about the closest thing we have to an alien language. It's very much worth studying with all the tools we have.
Besides that, the 12 year old in me just screams look at the size of their brains! There has to be something going on in there. I really want to know what they have to say!
The smarter birds are easier to study. As are the great apes and dolphins. Research has been finding it isn't brain size so much as density and architecture of particular parts that leads to what we call 'intelligence', and I would assume what we could call a 'conversation'. Not that we shouldn't study whale songs, but that the scope is much larger than you indicated. We can communicate with gorillas with English words (but not English grammar last I heard?), but I'm not sure if we even know what noises and gestures gorillas make that are communication or are just them clearing their throats. But I've gone past studies working out the vocabularies of birds and meerkats.
Whale song is about the closest thing we have to an alien language. It's very much worth studying with all the tools we have.
Besides that, the 12 year old in me just screams look at the size of their brains! There has to be something going on in there. I really want to know what they have to say!