iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 14/10/2026

Old conceptual frameworks need an update. Very excited to be awarded the Schmidt Sciences HAVI Award for "Rethinking Language" in collaboration with @ninabegus.bsky.social . Humanities have a bright future! www.schmidtsciences.org/havi-2026-an...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Imagitation it itself imagitation. Read this great book! @metahaven.bsky.social

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

If we believe in AI’s ability to control us, and AI is unable to do so, we lose little. If we don’t believe in singularity, and AI can in fact control us, we stand to lose everything. Wager, then, without hesitation, that AI is (able to control us)! Read here: begus.substack.com/p/pascals-wa...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

We form our identities always in relation to the other. The other used to be the animals, now the other is artificial, silicon intelligence. This provides an opportunity to identify as a biological intelligence that will unite the natural world. begus.substack.com/p/the-next-t...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

It is now clear that the humanities will rule the future of higher education. Here's a good starting point: Artificial Humanities introduced humanistic thought to the development of AI. First Encounters extends this and reflects on writing in AI.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Department of Marine Linguistics

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

My talk on a new conceptualization of language at the Science of Intelligence seminar at Berkeley. archive.org/details/redw...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Handout from today. zenodo.org/records/2280...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

For example: 3rd sg. śrótu, 2nd du. śrutám, 2nd pl. śróta. Also maybe: 1st pl. sumus, 2nd pl. estis, 3rd pl. sunt. My attempt to squeeze out the last human-generated ideas before AI takes over. escholarship.org/uc/item/8608...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

My coping mechanism in the age of AI: write more Proto-Indo-European papers. Here’s a story on the origin of PIE mobility. I argue that in Pre-PIE, a rule operated that whereby heavy syllables attracted stress from the root to the ending. I focus on root nouns and verbs.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Yes, Joyce was exploring the prior layers of language. Here's a project that lets you explore those prior stages: latentspacecraft.antikythera.org Glad to se that the industry is coming to the same conclusion! @metahaven.bsky.social @ninabegus.bsky.social @robert-booth.bsky.social

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

A new book series just dropped!

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Best way to escape AI: start writing in cuneiform. It’s how it all started!

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

AI will unite the biological world.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

When a paper becomes a piece of art. latentspacecraft.antikythera.org

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Exciting update: "Breaking the Wall of Hidden Whale Vowels" has been selected as one of ten finalists for the 2026 Falling Walls Science Breakthrough of the Year in Social Sciences & Humanities.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

A great paper on how finding language-like structure in cetaceans can reframe the way we think of language and animal rights. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

This is what was hiding in the spectrum. doi.org/10.1162/OPMI...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

This was the initial clue that eventually led to the discovery of vowels in sperm whales. Understanding AI and reframing language as informative imagitation can help us step outside our human biases and discover new realities about the natural world. Published in Royal Society Open Science.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

We built an artificial baby model that learns language directly from raw sound and trained it to imitate whale speech. Then we looked inside. Our interpretability method recovered the properties biologists already thought were meaningful and pointed out those that had not been considered before.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

How to approach an unknown language in the ocean? Here’s one of the first cases of AI interpretability leading to a scientific discovery -- in whales.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Berkeley Linguistics is celebrating 125 years! The first Department of Linguistics in the US.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Read the Gothenburg Post today.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Read the paper here: dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

Since Aristotle, literary theory has studied texts and reception. We propose a new object of literary study: the latent spaces of an AI model trained on a single text. We call the method latent reading and apply it to the first case study: FinneganLM, trained on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

New technology can help us listen to the ocean. Yesterday we deployed an automatic glider that will record our whales for up to 30 days. Humbling to experience the vastness of whales’ lives.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

It can do so again by making us rethink the position of human and language in the natural world.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Linguistics is a powerful science that has the capacity to change the course of history (like it did when Darwin borrowed from linguistics to argue for his evolutionary theory).

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Aristotle wrote that dolphins have voice (which requires imagination and soul), but not complex sounds. I'll be arguing that cetaceans have much more complex sounds than what we used to believe.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Very excited to give a keynote talk at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) later today. I'll be talking about a new reframing of language and how some long held beliefs are being challenged by AI and new advances in understanding animals.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

The one thing LLMs couldn’t do so far was write hymns in the correct Sanskrit meter. Until now.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Whales use vowels differently when ships are around. First glimpse at vowels being meaningful in whales too.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Science is reporting on our work today. We discuss advances in AI creativity, its limits, metalinguistics, consciousness, and the importance of linguistic research. Also, try out ConlangCrafter, an agentic pipeline for creating constructed languages. www.science.org/content/arti...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Marine linguistics is a thing! I talk about doing linguistics on whales, what this means for legal rights of animals, and about understanding AI. aiandyou.net/e/316-guest-...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Studying ancient languages such as Sanskrit or Hittite is like time travel. You try to enter the minds and worlds of people who lived four thousand years ago.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Wittgenstein famously said that the limits of our language are the limits of our world. This research is using AI to generate endless made-up languages to challenge the limits of possible languages and worlds.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Thanks to B. Scot Rousse for referencing my commencement speech in his great piece! open.substack.com/pub/begus/p/...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 16/06/2026

122 years after the first Bloomsday a model that learns language like humans is trained on Finnegans Wake and starts imagitating new sentences at the border between language and prelanguage. @ninabegus.bsky.social @metahaven.bsky.social latentspacecraft.antikythera.org

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

The next big thing is studying the sociology of AI models. Very excited to be a keynote speaker at the 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science in Burlington, Vermont on July 28-31, 2026. Check out the amazing program.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Full text: open.substack.com/pub/begus/p/...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

After 10+ years of fieldwork, experiments, and analysis, the paper is finally out. The paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.wo... The whale paper: doi.org/10.1098/rspb...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

This beautiful dialect of Slovenian has one of the most intriguing tone systems. One pattern, low-mid vowels resisting retracted stress, is strikingly reminiscent of something we've found in whale phonology. Tone, stress, quantity, and quality interact, which is very rare.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

This fabulous book, The Hard Question of Art by @metahaven.bsky.social is available for preorder! Coming out in August. www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/775582...

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

In this moment, when humanity is realizing that its intelligence might not be the most exclusive and unique, it is worth forming our alliances with other biological beings. Perhaps it’s time to start learning not only from other humans, but from other species as well. It is time to listen deeply

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

There are many things meaningful to us humans that whales never see. There are no trees and no ground in their world. But the opposite is also true. There are things in their lives that we cannot even imagine. As you go out in the world, search for those unimaginable things.

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

If a syllabus doesn't contain a quote in a non-latin alphabet, it's not a syllabus. Aristotle should have been in Greek!

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Gasper Begus @begus.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

A snapshot of the future.

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