A group of scientists said they had a first-of-its-kind conversation with a humpback whale that could lead to humans communicating with aliens one day.
This is an awesome lecture by a guy who works in a team that’s been training AI models to decode languages and translate languages without any external dictionary. Pretty interesting in itself but it gets crazy when they apply it to animal communication and realize the same principles apply. Defo worth a watch.
The bit about the whales having “culture” that’s potentially >30 million years old, compared to the fact that humans have only been around for ~150k years blew my mind.
The foresight the team has had to try not to fuck up this culture with a load of garbled AI nonsense is pretty amazing too.