ORGANIZATION
Earth Species Project
The nonprofit Raskin co-founded in 2017 using transformer architectures to decode nonhuman animal communication — his working demonstration of extra human AI.
The Earth Species Project is a nonprofit research organization Aza Raskin co-founded in 2017 with Britt Selvitelle, dedicated to using machine learning — specifically the transformer architectures that power large language models — to decode the communication systems of nonhuman animals. The organization has released NatureLM-audio, the first foundation model trained on animal vocalizations; presented research at NeurIPS; and secured seventeen million dollars in grants heading into 2025. Its significance in Raskin's broader framework lies in the demonstration that the same technology he warns could hack the operating system of civilization can be redirected toward the expansion of human understanding rather than the capture of human attention.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The project's intellectual framing distinguishes between super human and extra human applications of AI. Super human applications accelerate what humans already do — more code, more features, more productive output along existing dimensions. Extra human applications expand what humans can perceive and understand — making categories of knowing available that the pre-AI world did not make visible.