Incorporated in 2018, The Earth Species Project (ESP) is a non-profit organization focused on using artificial intelligence to advance our understanding of animal communication, and ultimately to understand non-human languages. ESPs team of AI research scientists work in close partnership with leading biologists, ethologists and research labs from around the world to use machine learning to advance the study of communication in other species, while also supporting conservation efforts. Key research projects underway include the development of the first large foundation models trained on large scales of unlabelled biological data; benchmarks that allow us to measure progress in the field; and self-supervised machine learning models for discovering patterns in animal behavior data.