The Earth Species Project, a U.S.-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 Reid Hoffman’s Aphorism Foundation; the remaining $7 million is a three-year pledge from the Waverley Street Foundation, one of billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs’ philanthropic vehicles.

The Earth Species Project plans to use the funding, which amounts to more than five times its 2023 expenses, to “at least double” the size of its AI research team. Its eight-person global research team is currently studying bird vocalization patterns to help with conversation efforts and working on an early ChatGPT-esque 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.

“In the last two years, AI has shown us that anything that can be translated will be translated,” says Aza Raskin, cofounder and president of the six-year-old Earth Species Project and a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum. “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.”

In 2013, Raskin was listening to an NPR story about the Gelada monkey’s human-like vocalizations when he first wondered if animal communication could be decoded. Five years later, the three-time entrepreneur and former Mozilla designer cofounded the Earth Species Project with two other Silicon Valley alumni: Britt Selvitelle, part of the founding team at Twitter, and Katie Zacarian, an early Facebook employee.

The organization wants to make it possible for humans to communicate with other species—or at least understand what they are saying—by 2030. So far, it’s done that by funding research on specific animals’ vocalization patterns (current projects: beluga whales, crows and zebra finches) and through a more general “foundation model” that it aims to evolve into something like what ChatGPT is for human communication. The earliest version of the general model was released in 2022, and identifies patterns within a trove of audio recordings of animals across species through a variety of machine learning techniques. One such technique is an “embedding,” for example, which is like a network graph that groups sounds and images by similarity. As the organization gets more data and updates their models, more patterns will appear—eventually allowing us to extrapolate “meaning” from that data based on their similarity, without needing any underlying knowledge of what the data means.

Since its founding, Earth Species Project has published five peer-reviewed papers (with a sixth in the pipeline) and self-published three papers; some are related to specific species and others to its foundation model.

The Earth Species Project has largely run on donations from billionaires, in part thanks to its cofounders’ roots in Silicon Valley. Raskin met Hoffman when he was working at Mozilla designing Firefox and Hoffman was on the board. He first floated the idea of the Earth Species Project to Hoffman in 2015. Hoffman is “fascinated by the philosophical implications of what happens when it’s not just humans that have culture and have language, and what that means for the shift in the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature,” Raskin says. He was introduced to Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation in 2022 through a mutual friend who is working to fight climate change. Per Raskin, making animals appear more “human” could get people to care more about them and care about biodiversity, which would help sustain the planet and human life.

Hoffman has seeded the Earth Species Project with $1 million a year for the last three years; blockchain billionaire Chris Larsen, the Internet Archive and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation (tied to the deceased cofounder of Microsoft) have also contributed. Prior to the newly-announced donations, the project has collected $9 million in funding since inception, per tax filings as of the end of 2023. The new $17 million in donations announced Thursday will help the organization hire additional researchers, who will go into the field and collect new data that will be used to train both the foundational model and do species-specific research.

According to Raskin, access to training data is the project’s biggest challenge right now. Unlike large language models that can train on, essentially, all the data the internet has to offer, the Earth Species Project needs to collect recordings from various species. And animal data is hard to understand—even with the data the nonprofit already has, it’s technically challenging to separate individual animal sounds out from a noisy environment. Then there’s the additional problem that there isn’t as much commercial funding for animal communication AI models as there is for the human kind, even though it’s also computationally expensive. Skeptics say that the idea of “translating” animal communications may assume fundamental similarities versus human speech that may not exist.

Even though it’s a nonprofit, the organization’s Silicon Valley roots and its funders think of their work in an entrepreneurial sense. Raskin compared the new round of grants to the first big round of funding a for-profit startup would get from a venture capitalist like Hoffman. The technology is there, he believes. Biologists have used their foundational model to help them decode field recordings, and their early research can show what sounds indicate when a crow is about to leave its nest, for example. Says Raskin, “All you need to do is add money.”