The underlying classifier, BirdNET, is a traditional neural network and not an LLM:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101236

Note that while the underlying birdnet-go project started as BirdNET only, it can now use Google Perch v2, BattyBirdNET (for bats!) and other models in the future. It's a really cool project!

Are there any LLMs being widely used for audio classification? I know VLMs are being used a lot in image stuff.

It always seems kind of silly to me to throw everything at an LLM. I know they’re huge and can automatically handle a huge number of tasks but something in me finds it wasteful when we could be creating easily trainable, cheap to run bespoke models for a lot of stuff

There are LLMs that support audio input, similar to those with vision support.

From my testing of open weights LLMs with audio support, they basically are only trained to recognize audio as an alternative to text input, they treat audio as basically equivalent to a transcript, and can't recognize or distinguish things like music, accents, background sounds, etc.

So they're only really good for transcribing or summarizing or using audio input in place of text input for prompts, but not anything that requires distinguishing any information about the audio that would not be present in a transcript.

It can be tempting to try to use an LLM for a variety of tasks; kind of the whole thing about an LLM is that you don't have to do a separate complex training run for every task, but can just provide instructions in natural language. But it only works as far as what the training data covers, if the training basically always treated audio and a text transcript as equivalent, the model has nothing causing it to learn other relevant features of the audio. If there's enough bird call identification in the training data of an LLM, it might be able to do that, but I think multimodal training data tends to be much more limited than the text training corpus

More info please. Can I add this into birdnet go for more species detection?

Curious if there is a similar project for dog barks.

fm = Foundation Models

https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/334/

Quite an interesting selection committee:

  Neal Stephenson
  Gwern Branwen
  Matt Huang

Right? I'd submit something just for the chance of lodging an idea in the head of Stephenson or Gwern.

This geographic puzzle feels like the modern day version of the Seven Bridges of Königsberg:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg

It was a $1 million donation to Vanderbilt in April 2020 to support three COVID research projects, including one related to the Moderna vaccine:

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...

Thank you

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has been gifting free books to kids from birth to age 5 for over three decades: https://imaginationlibrary.com/

It’s a matter of preference: Everything OP says about GUI development getting easier is also true about TUI development getting easier.

> What makes Github special is the ecosystem and integrations. Sentry, Linear, and so many other tools have special UX around Github. You need centralization (or at the very least, a standard) for that.

I think “a standard” is the key here. There is no reason why integrations must work through a proprietary centralized service.

You can set latitude and longitude after opening settings with the gear icon.