This is an interesting way to frame the finding: We suggest we found these similarities because humans and whales share a learning mechanism: culture I feel

This is an interesting way to frame the finding: We suggest we found these similarities because humans and whales share a learning mechanism: culture I feel like we often have such an anthropocentric view of intelligence, learning, and culture that it’s fascinating to consider what we’re not seeing from other species just because we aren’t looking for it, especially with a growing list of potentially sapient[0] species. Cultural evolution inevitably leads to the emergence of properties that make learning easier. I wonder if this idea about cultural evolution could apply in some tangential way to model distillation[1] and synthetic training data and active inheritance[2] and the gains in efficiency and efficacy we've seen lately: While Zipf’s Law[3] might not perfectly apply to every language and also applies to some data that isn’t linguistic, it is an interesting indicator that something we don’t understand might be a language. There was also similar research[1] into bottlenose dolphins years ago, and some researchers speculate that if we ever detected a signal from an extraterrestrial intelligence[4] it would also follow Zipf’s Law. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#examples https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#example... [1]: https://www.datacamp.com/blog/distillation-llm https://www.datacamp.com/blog/distillation-llm [2]: https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/active-inheritance-a-smarter-way-to-train-models-with-synthetic-data/ https://www.deeplearning.ai/the-batch/active-inheritance-a-s... [3]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law [4]: https://www.seti.org/animal-communications-information-theory-and-search-extraterrestrial-intelligence-seti https://www.seti.org/animal-communications-information-theor...