Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Sunday October 20th.

Today on Forbes, this nonprofit wants to use AI to understand animal communication

and two billionaires are backing it.

The Earth Species Project, a US-based nonprofit that aims to decode animal communication by using AI,

announced $17 million in new grants from billionaires on

Thursday.

The organization shared exclusively with Forbes.

Of the new funding, $10 million came from billionaire investor and entrepreneur Reed Hoffman's

Afarism Foundation, and the remaining $7 million is a three-year pledge from the Waverly Street Foundation, one of billionaire

Lorraine Powell Jobs's philanthropic vehicles. The Earth Species Project

plans to use the funding which amounts to more than five times its 2023 expenses to to

at least, at least double the size of its AI research team.

Its 8-person global research team is currently studying bird

vocalization patterns to help with conversation efforts and working on an

early chat gpet-gp-esk model for animals regardless of species. The

organization's ultimate goal is for its research to shift humans understanding of our place

in the natural world, and in doing so, help with climate change and biodiversity. Aza Raskin, co-founder and president of the six-year-old Earth Species Project,

and a Forbes 30 under 30 alum, says, quote,

In the last two years, AI has shown us that anything that can be translated

will be translated. Like the telescope that allowed us to discover that Earth was not

the center of the solar system, I think our tools are going to let us look out at the universe and discover

that humanity is not the center.

...