I work at Google on the Gemma team, and while not on the core team for this model, participated a bit on this project.
I personally was happy to see this project get built. The dolphin researchers have been doing great science for years, from the computational/mathematics side it was quite neat see how that was combined with the Gemma models.
It's great that dolphins are getting audio decoders in language models first, does the Gemma team intend to roll that out for human speech at some point eventually too?