I really doubt both their methods and your conclusion. The project tried to teach animals to adapt to the human naming system, and more importantly, it wasn’t a true social-level experiment with animals.

(That said, in my opinion, Koko was smart. Critics of Patterson’s claims have acknowledged that Koko learned a number of signs and used them to communicate her wants and needs.)

Imagine an alien taking an one- or two-year-old human baby and trying to teach him to communicate with alien using vocal signals that humans have difficulty producing or perceiving—and, most importantly, where naming is not a social-level communication that boosts ecological fitness. That’s basically what they did with Koko. It’s like training an LLM model on text corpora where the loss function (fitness measure) is inconsistent or even meaningless—would that produce a useful model?

We first need to understand how animals naturally name things, and then enrich that naming system in a way that fits their minds—not force them to learn human naming. Most importantly, this naming should improve their ecological fitness in a consistent way, so that they can ‘feel’ the fitness of certain naming and evolve their minds toward it.

That’s why Google DolphinGemma is so remarkable. If they succeed, they might mimic dolphin-like communication in a way other dolphins truly understand—gradually introducing naming and concepts that improve evolutionary fitness: finding food, recognizing others, being happy, and identifying suitable mates. If recursive naming develops, I believe it could even lead to real cognitive evolution.

This is just a rough idea, but I truly believe in it-—based on self-meta-cognition about how my own mind evolved and works, as well as other observations. Unfortunately, I don’t have the power or energy to explore it deeply, but I hope someone working on animal cognition research will take a closer look at using large language models like DolphinGemma and dive deeper.