  Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents
to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity
and recall. In humans, it is the inheritance process that powers cumulative
cultural evolution, expanding our skills, tools and knowledge across
generations. We provide a method for generating zero-shot, high recall cultural
transmission in artificially intelligent agents. Our agents succeed at
real-time cultural transmission from humans in novel contexts without using any
pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients
sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation
methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural
evolution as an algorithm for developing artificial general intelligence.
