We had a whale of a year. 🐋
This year we continued researching what counts as language and intelligence -- in humans, animals, and machines.
A few highlights:
– We uncovered vowels and diphthongs in sperm whales, with consequences that reach all the way to law and animal rights
Dec 31, 2025 17:48– We showed that recursion and metalinguistic analysis, long assumed to be uniquely human, can now be carried out by LLMs
– We built tools that let models analyze and generate language itself, including entirely new languages
– Our work crossed into Nature, The Economist, NatGeo, WIRED, IEEE Spectrum, Die ZEIT, and even the Venice Biennale
– We spent the summer thinking about the future of language and AI at Schloss Dagstuhl and in linguistics and AI communities worldwide
