UC Berkeley linguist Gašper Beguš describes sperm whales as an alien intelligence living in the ocean next door, and says that decoding their communication could unlock culture and shift how humans treat other minds.
His lab built an AI-based pipeline that invents new languages, their grammars, and translations. The resulting synthetic languages provide practice data for deciphering unfamiliar systems, training researchers for signals that do not look or sound like human language.
He applied that system to sperm whales, whose codas were long treated as click counts plus timing, almost an “alien Morse code.” After training models to imitate codas, Beguš used internal interpretability to inspect what the model encoded. Alongside timing, the model also surfaced the frequency spectrum as meaningful.
Whales speak slowly, but when their silences are removed and clicks are sped up, stable spectral bands appear, analogous to human vowels. A pattern once lumped together as one repeated call split into two categories, which are labeled as the whales' “A” and “I” vowels, a difference that can be heard by the human ear. (Check out the recording in Beguš's talk at the OpenAI Forum to hear them!) Beguš stresses that these sounds sit inside a complex whale society. Dialects are so distinctive that about a minute of listening can identify a whale group’s ocean region. Whales live in families and clans, communicate across key routines like before they go on deep hunts for 45 minutes underwater, or before sleep.
The most vivid example of culture comes at birth: Beguš’s team recorded the first sperm whale birth ever captured, with eleven females gathering to help deliver the whale calf and lift it to the surface for air, chattering and clicking intensely all the while.
Beguš, who has worked extensively with ChatGPT models in his linguistics research, linked his work on animal intelligence to law and policy, arguing that evidence of language-like structure in whale communication could support stronger protections for animals, challenging a long-running argument that animals lack language and therefore lack rights.
