# DolphinGemma

Marine biology / dolphin vocalization model. Developed with the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP) and Georgia Tech. Announced April 2025.

## Status

**Not publicly released as of April 2026.** DeepMind's page states "DolphinGemma is currently in development. On release, it will be openly available." No weights on Hugging Face, Kaggle, or Google AI for Developers. Google's 2025 post anticipated a summer 2025 open-source release; that slipped.

If you see a `dolphingemma-*` tag somewhere, it is either community-named (not Google) or a leaked checkpoint. Verify the uploader is `google/` on HF.

## What it is (from announcement material)

- **Audio-in, audio-out** model.
- Trained on tens of thousands of hours of Atlantic spotted dolphin vocalizations.
- Predicts the next sound in a sequence (same training objective as an LLM, just in the audio token domain).
- **~400M parameters** — small enough to run on a Pixel phone in the field.
- Intended to plug into the CHAT (Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry) system to accelerate real-time pattern recognition during dolphin interactions.

## Base generation

Announced as "built on Google's open Gemma series." Google has not disclosed which generation. Given the mid-2025 timing and 400M size, most likely Gemma 3-era tech, but **this is an educated guess**, not confirmed.

## Model card

- DeepMind: https://deepmind.google/models/gemma/dolphingemma/
- Blog: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/dolphingemma/

No model card on ai.google.dev yet (expected once released).

## Prompt format

Not published. The audio-token I/O format will depend on the tokenizer Google picked (e.g., SoundStream, Whisper-style, or a custom cetacean-phoneme tokenizer). Wait for release.

## Minimum invocation

Not possible. No weights available.

## When to choose it

If and when it ships: marine biology research, specifically Atlantic spotted dolphins. Fine-tunable for other cetacean species per Google.

## Homelab fit

Zero for normal use. If it ships and Seth wants a novelty "run the model on a cheap Pi and watch it hallucinate dolphin whistles" project, it's a candidate for the 400M-parameter slot on seth-pi. Until then, nothing to deploy.