Chimpanzees can keep a rhythmic beat
Not to be outdone by Ronan the beat-keeping sea lion or woodpeckers in the forest, some chimpanzees are also able to keep a beat and use regular spacing between drum hits. Over 300 observations of two distinct subspecies–eastern and western chimpanzees–show that the primates can drum with distinguishable rhythms. The findings are detailed in a study published May 9 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology and suggest that the building blocks of our species' ability to write music likely arose in a common ancestor that Homo sapiens share with chimpanzees.
'Based on our previous work, we expected that western chimpanzees would use more hits and drums more quickly than eastern chimpanzees,' Vesta Eleuteri, a study co-author and cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna in Austria, said in a statement. 'But we didn't expect to see such clear differences in rhythm or to find that their drumming rhythms shared such clear similarities with human music.'
[ Related: Chimp conversations can take on human-like chaos. ]
A 2022 study from the same research team showed that chimpanzees can drum on the buttress roots of trees. Drumming on these large tree roots that grow above the soil can produce low frequency sounds. The team suggests that these percussive patterns are used to send information to other chimps over both long and short distances.
'Our previous study showed that each chimpanzee has their own unique drumming style and that drumming helps to keep others in their group updated about where they are and what they're doing—a sort of way to check in across the rainforest,' Eleuteri said. 'What we didn't know was whether chimpanzees living in different groups have different drumming styles and whether their drumming is rhythmic, like in human music.'
In this new study, Eleuteri joined forces with Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St. Andrews in the UK and Andrea Ravignani of Sapienza University in Italy, as well as other chimpanzee researchers from around the world. They studied 371 drumming bouts in 11 wild chimpanzee communities, including six populations and two subspecies. They tested whether chimps drum rhythmically or show regional variation in drumming and how it integrates with their loud and structurally complex vocalizations called 'pant-hoots.'
They analyzed the drum patterns and found that chimpanzees can drum with rhythm. The timing of their hits is often easily spaced and does not appear to be random. There were also different patterns in the Eastern subspecies (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) and Western subspecies (Pan troglodytes verus). Western chimpanzees used evenly spaced hits and hit their 'drums' more, using a faster tempo, and integrated the drumming into their pant-hoot vocalizations earlier. Eastern chimpanzees more frequently alternated between hits and at shorter and longer time intervals.
'Making music is a fundamental part of what it means to be human—but we don't know for how long we have been making music,' says Hobaiter. 'Showing that chimpanzees share some of the fundamental properties of human musical rhythm in their drumming is a really exciting step in understanding when and how we evolved this skill. Our findings suggest that our ability to drum rhythmically may have existed long before we were human.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
WIRED
44 minutes ago
- WIRED
Inside the AI Party at the End of the World
Jun 11, 2025 7:00 AM At a mansion overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a group of AI insiders met to debate one unsettling question: If humanity ends, what comes next? Photo-Illustration:In a $30 million mansion perched on a cliff overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, a group of AI researchers, philosophers, and technologists gathered to discuss the end of humanity. The Sunday afternoon symposium, called 'Worthy Successor,' revolved around a provocative idea from entrepreneur Daniel Faggella: The 'moral aim' of advanced AI should be to create a form of intelligence so powerful and wise that 'you would gladly prefer that it (not humanity) determine the future path of life itself.' Faggella made the theme clear in his invitation. 'This event is very much focused on posthuman transition,' he wrote to me via X DMs. 'Not on AGI that eternally serves as a tool for humanity.' A party filled with futuristic fantasies, where attendees discuss the end of humanity as a logistics problem rather than a metaphorical one, could be described as niche. If you live in San Francisco and work in AI, then this is a typical Sunday. About 100 guests nursed nonalcoholic cocktails and nibbled on cheese plates near floor-to-ceiling windows facing the Pacific ocean before gathering to hear three talks on the future of intelligence. One attendee sported a shirt that said 'Kurzweil was right,' seemingly a reference to Ray Kurzweil, the futurist who predicted machines will surpass human intelligence in the coming years. Another wore a shirt that said 'does this help us get to safe AGI?' accompanied by a thinking face emoji. Faggella told WIRED that he threw this event because 'the big labs, the people that know that AGI is likely to end humanity, don't talk about it because the incentives don't permit it' and referenced early comments from tech leaders like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Demis Hassabis, who 'were all pretty frank about the possibility of AGI killing us all.' Now that the incentives are to compete, he says, 'they're all racing full bore to build it.' (To be fair, Musk still talks about the risks associated with advanced AI, though this hasn't stopped him from racing ahead). On LinkedIn, Faggella boasted a star-studded guest list, with AI founders, researchers from all the top Western AI labs, and 'most of the important philosophical thinkers on AGI.' The first speaker, Ginevera Davis, a writer based in New York, warned that human values might be impossible to translate to AI. Machines may never understand what it's like to be conscious, she said, and trying to hard-code human preferences into future systems may be shortsighted. Instead, she proposed a lofty-sounding idea called 'cosmic alignment'—building AI that can seek out deeper, more universal values we haven't yet discovered. Her slides often showed a seemingly AI-generated image of a techno-utopia, with a group of humans gathered on a grass knoll overlooking a futuristic city in the distance. Critics of machine consciousness will say that large language models are simply stochastic parrots—a metaphor coined by a group of researchers, some of whom worked at Google, who wrote in a famous paper that LLMs do not actually understand language and are only probabilistic machines. But that debate wasn't part of the symposium, where speakers took as a given the idea that superintelligence is coming, and fast. By the second talk, the room was fully engaged. Attendees sat cross-legged on the wood floor, scribbling notes. A philosopher named Michael Edward Johnson took the mic and argued that we all have an intuition that radical technological change is imminent, but we lack a principled framework for dealing with the shift—especially as it relates to human values. He said that if consciousness is 'the home of value,' then building AI without fully understanding consciousness is a dangerous gamble. We risk either enslaving something that can suffer or trusting something that can't. (This idea relies on a similar premise to machine consciousness and is also hotly debated.) Rather than forcing AI to follow human commands forever, he proposed a more ambitious goal: teaching both humans and our machines to pursue 'the good.' (He didn't share a precise definition of what 'the good' is, but he insists it isn't mystical and hopes it can be defined scientifically.) Philosopher Michael Edward Johnson Photograph: Kylie Robison Entrepreneur and speaker Daniel Faggella Photograph: Kylie Robison Finally, Faggella took the stage. He believes humanity won't last forever in its current form and that we have a responsibility to design a successor, not just one that survives but one that can create new kinds of meaning and value. He pointed to two traits this successor must have: consciousness and 'autopoiesis,' the ability to evolve and generate new experiences. Citing philosophers like Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche, he argued that most value in the universe is still undiscovered and that our job is not to cling to the old but to build something capable of uncovering what comes next. This, he said, is the heart of what he calls 'axiological cosmism,' a worldview where the purpose of intelligence is to expand the space of what's possible and valuable rather than merely serve human needs. He warned that the AGI race today is reckless and that humanity may not be ready for what it's building. But if we do it right, he said, AI won't just inherit the Earth—it might inherit the universe's potential for meaning itself. During a break between panels and the Q&A, clusters of guests debated topics like the AI race between the US and China. I chatted with the CEO of an AI startup who argued that, of course , there are other forms of intelligence in the galaxy. Whatever we're building here is trivial compared to what must already exist beyond the Milky Way. At the end of the event, some guests poured out of the mansion and into Ubers and Waymos, while many stuck around to continue talking. "This is not an advocacy group for the destruction of man,' Faggella told me. 'This is an advocacy group for the slowing down of AI progress, if anything, to make sure we're going in the right direction.'
Newsweek
3 hours ago
- Newsweek
Ravi Kumar's Vision: Leading Cognizant Through Uncertainty Into the AI-Powered Future
Growing up in India as the eldest of three brothers, Ravi Kumar didn't start out looking like leadership material. "I didn't do well in school. I was at the bottom of my class," he admits. "Normally, when you're at the bottom, you're good at something like sports or art. I wasn't good at anything." He lived in the shadow of his younger siblings—both brilliant students who went on to become doctors. "I was the elder, and I was known as their brother," Kumar says, the irony evident in his voice. "It wasn't a great thing." Yet, the academic underachiever would go on to produce a remarkable turnaround, excelling in chemical engineering at Shivaji University, a solid but decidedly not elite state school. "Once I tasted success, the aspirations to punch above my weight grew," Kumar says. He eventually landed a coveted position at India's prestigious Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC). There, working alongside graduates of elite institutions, Kumar discovered his potential. "I didn't go to an IIT [Indian Institute of Technology], but I felt like, 'Wait a minute, I'm able to compete with these guys,'" he says. Not that everyone agreed at the time. In 1992, Kumar won an award for young scientists named after "the Indian Oppenheimer," Dr. Homi Bhabha. "When I told my dad, he couldn't believe it," Kumar recalls. "He almost innocuously said, 'Can I see the certificate?'" Today, that once-struggling student turned nuclear scientist runs a $36 billion global technology company with nearly 350,000 employees. In his office high in a gleaming tower in Manhattan's Hudson Yards development, Kumar greets visitors with a high-wattage smile. Dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, he gestures toward large windows that frame a panoramic view out towards the Hudson River—and, as he points out with amusement, his own apartment in the next tower over. Cognizant at the Crossroads Kumar inherited a company at an inflection point. Founded in 1994 as an in-house technology unit of Dun & Bradstreet, Cognizant had grown into a powerhouse in IT services by providing skilled technical labor in India—today, more than two-thirds of Cognizant's employees are based in India—to Western companies looking to outsource their technology operations. But after years of stellar growth, the company had hit turbulence. In the months before Kumar's arrival, its stock had declined nearly 40 percent off its pandemic peak. The challenges weren't unique to Cognizant. The rise of AI threatened to upend decades-old business models. The entire IT services industry faced an existential question: What happens to a business built on human outsourcing when machines start writing code? Kumar's response was characteristically bold. Just months after joining Cognizant (which has led to ongoing litigation with Infosys over trade secrets and anti-competition allegations by both companies), he committed $1 billion to AI initiatives—a massive bet for a company still working through organizational challenges. "Cognizant had a lull for a couple of years," Kumar acknowledges. "It was hard for somebody to say, 'As I'm fixing the ship, I'm going to invest $1 billion into the future.'" The Outsider's Path What makes Kumar's rise to CEO remarkable is how dramatically it diverges from those of most Indian executives who lead large global companies. High-profile CEOs of Indian ancestry often follow one of a few well-worn paths: They are either American-born to immigrant parents, American-educated (usually the privilege of quite wealthy families in India), graduates of the hyper-competitive IITs which have acceptance rates that make the Ivy League look like community colleges, or they work their way up the corporate ladder at a large multinational company, usually moving to the United States as younger adults. Kumar did none of these things. Instead, Kumar forged his own way through the less-traveled route of nuclear science at BARC, a pivotal institution in India's recent history and a symbol of its scientific self-reliance and national ambition. Working in this environment provided Kumar with an analytical framework that would underpin his entire career. "Science was slow and methodical, giving you a framework to apply yourself," he explains. This scientific grounding would shape his approach to business problems throughout his career, but he also discovered something else about science: "The pace of science was slower than the pace of technology." That insight led Kumar to make a pivotal decision to shift from science to business. "I felt like if I had to make an impact, I had to be in a high-velocity world. So, I switched to technology, a high-velocity world." This led him to pursue an MBA and eventually a 20-year stint at Indian IT giant Infosys, where he rose to become president before taking the top job at Cognizant in 2023. "Each one of us discovers ourselves," Kumar reflects. "I discovered myself pretty late." His early frustrations stemmed from an intense drive for excellence that wasn't yet finding its outlet. After exploring various roles, Kumar recognized his true strength lay in organizational leadership, particularly in businesses centered on human capital. Gut, Data, Gut Kumar may have left the laboratory behind, but he never abandoned his scientific mindset. It deeply influences his approach to business decisions through a framework he calls "gut, data, gut." "I'm a believer that decision-making is about blending intuition, experience, and data. There is a formula in my head that I've applied to decision-making: You don't make a decision with less than 40 percent of the information needed. You make the decision when you have at most 70 percent of the information," Kumar explains. "Don't wait for a decision to be made beyond 70 percent of the data, because if you make that decision after 70 percent, you're already late. Intuition helps you ask the right questions, and data helps you validate it." Srinivas Kamadi, who worked with Kumar at Infosys and now runs his own AI firm, AidenAI, has witnessed this decision-making framework firsthand. "He's always validating his hypothesis," Kamadi notes, describing how Kumar rigorously applies data to test his ideas. Rather than seeking consensus or popularity, "he goes about his job in a very clinical way," filtering through options methodically. Kumar's $1 billion AI investment at Cognizant stands as perhaps the boldest application of this framework of combining scientific rigor with an intuitive leap—a high-stakes decision made when the company was still struggling to regain its footing and, coming before the ChatGPT-fueled AI boom had fully kicked in, when committing such resources to an emerging technology seemed risky to many observers. His conviction came partly from early signs that AI would transform software development—Cognizant's core business. "Some of the early experiments we did, including with Microsoft, [Amazon Web Services], and Google, gave me this feeling that this is going to come and conquer software development cycles and write code," he says. The bet appears to be paying off. On a recent Cognizant earnings call, Kumar boasted that 20 percent of its code had been generated by AI. The Networked CEO "I spent my first 40 years of my life in India and the next 10 in the US," he says. This later-career transition provided a unique perspective on both business environments. "In those 40 years, I dealt with the world in India, which is a very chaotic country. It's a growing economy but very chaotic." A daily life of "navigating that heterogeneity, complexity, uncomfortable zones and ambiguity," he explains, built strengths that prepared him for leadership challenges. Kumar points to a simple example: Indian roads. "If you drive a car in India, you can drive in any part of the world," he laughs. With more than 172,000 road fatalities in 2023 alone—approximately one death every three minutes—India's roads are a place where life-or-death decisions happen constantly. "Thriving in ambiguity, as I call it," Kumar says. The easy part of being a visionary leader, Ravi Kumar says, is having a vision of what's to come. The harder part is "to make everybody believe something is coming that they don't see." The easy part of being a visionary leader, Ravi Kumar says, is having a vision of what's to come. The harder part is "to make everybody believe something is coming that they don't see." Marleen Moise Kumar's leadership philosophy reflects another significant shift: from command-and-control to network-based organizational structures. "As organizations evolved in the digital age—I call it the golden age of technology—organizations went from hierarchical structures to network structures," he explains. In this networked world, Kumar believes the art of persuasion is more important than one's position on an org chart. Rather than imposing directives from above, he emphasizes building support through influence and communication. "As a CEO, I've always said it's easy to see what is coming," he explains, because people are constantly bringing you information, "so you can see what's coming." The hard part of being a visionary leader is not coming up with a vision but rather figuring out how to inspire others to follow it. "The bigger virtue is to make everybody believe something is coming that they don't see," he explains. Shrinivas Udatha, who worked with Kumar at Infosys for over 20 years, witnessed this persuasive leadership when Kumar spearheaded Infosys's U.S. expansion around 2018. "He can connect dots," Udatha observes, explaining how Kumar tailored his messaging to different stakeholders—highlighting long-term financial benefits when speaking with the CFO while emphasizing strategic client proximity when addressing the CEO. At Cognizant, Kumar describes his role as balancing the needs of key constituencies: employees, clients, and investors. Rather than considering these groups in isolation or prioritizing them sequentially, he emphasizes a holistic approach. "Every decision has to be integrated across these three stakeholders," he says. Kumar strives to create what he calls a "big small company" at Cognizant—an organization with enterprise-scale capabilities that maintains startup-like agility and entrepreneurial spirit. "For the fact that we have 350,000 employees, I'm amazed that everybody seems to know everybody," he says. "It's a very closely knit company." This networked approach has also influenced Kumar's approach to innovation. Shortly after taking the helm at Cognizant, he launched an initiative called Bluebolt to drive grassroots innovation across the company. "Everybody believes innovation is done in a department," Kumar says, rejecting the conventional siloed approach of "innovation labs" and "chief innovation officers." "I mean, you are insulting innovation by saying it has to be in a department." Instead, the Bluebolt program encourages all 350,000 Cognizant employees to think entrepreneurially about their work. So far, the initiative has generated over 300,000 ideas. "We have a central team which looks at these ideas, and we fund them with expertise, financial capital infrastructure so that we can prototype them and take it to clients," Kumar explains. "And in the process, you find the big idea as you keep looking for the small idea." The AI Revolution Cognizant was born during a period of global business expansion that was creating new technological needs. "As enterprises went global, they used technology to scale efficiently," Kumar explains. What that means, he says, is that instead of companies building their own "technology plumbing," as he calls it, "You wanted to focus on your own core and outsource the non-core." That outsourcing model formed the foundation of Cognizant's business for decades, but Kumar sees AI demanding a fundamentally different approach. Now, with AI, Kumar sees an even more profound change: "The future of technology is every industry is going to be a tech industry. Software is the alchemy for every business." He describes AI's impact working along three vectors. The first is embracing AI's ability to write code to speed up an organization's technology development cycle. "The second vector is to enable AI and agentification in an enterprise. You integrate it with the workflows in a company." The third vector, which he considers the most fascinating, is using AI to "unlock new service pools. These are new business opportunities." Cognizant office in Plano, Texas, USA. Cognizant office in Plano, Texas, USA. JHVEPhoto/Getty As an example, Kumar cites a recent client visit with a medical device company. The CIO described how they sell compact home medical equipment, including dialysis machines previously available only in clinical settings. The primary users are typically seniors aged 65 and older who, despite having these devices at home, often struggle to operate them independently. Instead of enjoying the convenience of home care, "they buy these compact devices, and then go to a clinic and they get a nurse to help them." Kumar recognized an opportunity: "I said, we can build a digital nurse for you as a service around the device. People can use the digital nurse to self-serve themselves." The transformation Kumar envisions goes beyond simply expanding Cognizant's service offerings—it's about redrawing the boundaries between what companies consider core functions and what they're willing to entrust to partners. Insurance underwriting exemplifies this shift. Surya Gummadi, Cognizant's president of Americas, explains: "Underwriting is considered core for the insurance industry. Historically, they have kept underwriting within their wheelhouse." But AI is fundamentally altering this calculus by disaggregating the process into components where intelligent agents can handle specific functions. The Human Element Despite his focus on technology, Kumar places remarkable emphasis on the human aspects of leadership—particularly vulnerability and psychological safety. "I'm one of those people who will not only be vulnerable but make everybody around me comfortable to be vulnerable," he says. His passion for Formula 1 is evident throughout his office space, where racing memorabilia dominates the décor—paintings of F1 cars adorn the walls. In the reception area, visitors can try their hand at a full-size simulator of the Aston Martin car his company sponsors. During a recent gathering with CEOs at a Formula 1 race in Las Vegas, Kumar found himself rethinking conventional wisdom about vulnerability. "When I'm the CEO and say I don't know AI, people won't judge me because I'm in a position of strength," he reflects. The challenge is different for those with less power or status. "If a school graduate tells me they don't know how to put on a tie or write something," he says, "they are putting their jobs at stake." And there lies the value of making employees feel safe: "If you create a psychological safety net, they will punch above their weight," he says, becoming "your force multiplier because people are learning boldly without hesitation." Workers working on laptops. Workers working on laptops. Abdul-Rafay Shaikh/Getty This human-centered approach to leadership reveals a profound understanding of what will distinguish human contribution in the age of intelligent machines. As AI takes over more routine cognitive tasks, the premium on uniquely human capabilities—creativity, empathy, collaboration, ethical judgment—will only increase. In Newsweek's AI Impact interview series with leading thinkers in the field, the importance of keeping humans in the loop with new AI tools has been a recurring theme. As Meta's chief AI scientist Yann LeCun told Newsweek, "AI will have a similar transformative effect on society as the printing press had in the 15th century." But crucially, the impact will be through "amplifying human intelligence, not replacing it." Staying Hungry For all his success, Kumar maintains the hunger that drove him to overcome his early academic struggles. This sometimes leads him to actively seek out uncomfortable situations, such as when he was invited to speak at a school in India while running a 25,000-person operation. When he got home, his wife, Amita, asked how it went. "Look, I didn't do well. I didn't feel like I hit it out of the park," Kumar recalls telling her. His wife's response: "So be it. Nobody's appraising you there. Why the hell are you worried? Move on." But Kumar couldn't let it go. "The next day, I went to my office. I kept calling schools," he says, inquiring whether they needed a guest speaker. He was determined to master this new challenge. "I wanted to do it again. I mean, I just wanted to beat it." "I'm very hungry for learning," Kumar says simply. "Who cares whether I did well in school?" This willingness to acknowledge shortcomings while relentlessly working to overcome them forms the cornerstone of Kumar's approach to both personal growth and corporate leadership. Leading a global technology giant into an uncertain future, Kumar—the once overlooked elder brother turned nuclear scientist turned global CEO—approaches the AI era with the quiet confidence of someone who has made a career of turning uncertainty into opportunity. The unconventional path that once made him an outsider may be precisely what equips him to lead in this new technological era. With reporting by Katherine Fung, Lauren Giella and Oliver Staley
Yahoo
8 hours ago
- Yahoo
Quantum system beats classical AI in real test, powers greener supercomputing future
In a major leap toward the future of computing, researchers have shown that even small-scale quantum processors can outperform classical algorithms in machine learning tasks. The finding offers a glimpse into a faster, greener era within the relatively new research field of Quantum Machine Learning, a space gaining momentum across both academia and new study combines quantum computing and machine learning, two of the most disruptive technologies of our time. Recent advances in both fields are reshaping the technological frontier. While AI is already embedded in everything from personal assistants to scientific research, quantum computing promises a fundamentally new way of processing information. Their intersection has given rise to a rapidly growing field: quantum machine learning. This emerging discipline explores whether quantum systems can improve the speed, accuracy, or efficiency of machine learning algorithms. However, proving such an advantage on today's limited quantum hardware remains a major challenge—one that researchers are just beginning to by an international team led by the University of Vienna, the experiment used a photonic quantum processor to classify data points, an essential task in modern AI systems. The researchers found that the quantum system outperformed its classical counterpart, making fewer errors—a rare, real-world glimpse of quantum advantage with current hardware. This breakthrough was achieved using a quantum photonic circuit developed at Italy's Politecnico di Milano and a machine learning algorithm proposed by UK-based Quantinuum. The experiment marks one of the first demonstrations of quantum enhancement in practical AI tasks, rather than simulations. By isolating the quantum contribution in the classification process, the team was able to pinpoint specific scenarios where quantum systems results not only validate the potential of photonic quantum processors but also lay the groundwork for identifying machine learning tasks where quantum computing can make a real-world impact, even with today's limited-scale hardware.'We found that for specific tasks, our algorithm commits fewer errors than its classical counterpart,' said Philip Walther, project lead from the University of Vienna. "This implies that existing quantum computers can show good performances without necessarily going beyond the state-of-the-art technology," adds Zhenghao Yin, first author of the accuracy, the experiment also reveals another important advantage in energy quantum systems process information using light and therefore consume significantly less power than traditional hardware, which is becoming increasingly important as AI's energy demands continue to rise.'This could prove crucial in the future, given that machine learning algorithms are becoming infeasible due to high energy demands,' said co-author Iris showing that today's quantum devices can already offer tangible improvements, the findings could steer both quantum computing and classical machine learning into a more symbiotic future, where quantum-inspired algorithms push conventional boundaries and photonic platforms help make AI more sustainable. The study has been published in the journal Nature Photonics.
