Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman has a pet octopus named Van Gogh, a starry night octopus who, as fate would have it, lost one tentacle in a fan.
“It’s a starry night octopus, hence Van Gogh. And then it got even more eerie because Van Gogh lost one tentacle in the in the fan,” Huberman said, during his appearance on the a16z podcast.
But what started as a nod to Vincent van Gogh has turned into something far more ambitious: an attempt to use artificial intelligence to decode what an octopus is actually thinking.
Huberman’s interest in cephalopods goes back to his time in San Diego, where his lab studied cuttlefish. “They’re like little underwater monkeys,” he said. “They’re incredibly intelligent.”
After moving to his current home and converting an art gallery into a living and working space, he decided he needed cephalopods again and brought home the starry night octopus.
“Here’s what I’m trying to do with the octopus,” Huberman explained. “This has everything to do with AI. I’m trying to get the octopus to report to me what it’s thinking because I do think they’re very intelligent.”
The approach he is exploring involves correlating the octopus’s camouflage and coloration patterns with its behaviors in real time. “You can’t apply a typical large language model,” he said. “You have to do it based on the coloration patterns, on the camouflage patterns. AI can actually learn a lot by correlating the behaviors of an octopus with its camouflage patterns.”
The challenge, he noted, is doing this while the animal is actively swimming, hunting, and moving. The goal is to build a model that teaches itself over time. “Certain camouflage patterns relate to certain behaviors, which relate to certain nuance in the behaviors, and then it could start teaching itself,” he said.
From there, the idea would be for the AI to present stimuli to Van Gogh in a way that could open up genuine communication. “It would translate that into octopus, and then we could communicate.”
Huberman was clear about why this matters to him and why it is not about novelty. He pushed back firmly on the popular trend of training animals to mimic human behaviors. “I saw that someone taught an octopus how to use a piano. That’s not interesting actually. All that tells you is how hard humans are willing to work to train a different organism to do something pretty rudimentary compared to what humans can do. It tells you everything about humans’ obsession with teaching other animals to be more human.”
What he wants instead is something entirely different. “I’m interested in what the octopus understands about the world and can communicate that to me, because I don’t know that stuff.”
He acknowledged the idea is still forming. “I’m probably not thinking about this as cleanly as I could or should,” he admitted. But the underlying conviction is serious. “They are accessing a certain perceptual landscape and they’re thinking hard about what’s there. We really need to figure out a way to let them tell us what they’re thinking.”
More octopuses are reportedly on the way.
