You would need some way to convert the whale LLM to human language though. Otherwise you would just be making pre trained GPT4 for whales. One option would be to label data according to induced reactions in whales to whale language completions (i.e., let the LLM complete whale language and use the reactions to try to induce some understanding. But it feels unlikely we would get further than providing a chatgpt for whales that only they can understand.
You wouldn't necessarily need that. You don't actually need translated text for every single language pair a LLM will learn to translate.
ie train a LLM on English, French, Spanish data. This data only contains parallel text in English-French. Can this LLM still translate to and from Spanish ? Yeah.
You still have a bridge and each of those languages are not just from the same species but the same language family. If there’s English to French and French to Spanish there’s a semantic relationship between English and Spanish.
There exists no bridge to whale any more than there is aliens from Alpha Centauri.
Common concepts are common, what species the language is in is not as relevant as you think. Text and Image space, two entirely different modalities are so related in high dimensional space, you can translate between them with just a simple linear projection layer.
