All AI Models Might be The Same

Summary

Project CETI is a large-scale effort to decode whale speech. If AI models do learn a universal language, we might be able to use it to talk to whales.Growing up, I sometimes played a game with my friends called “Mussolini or Bread.”It’s a guessing game, kind of like Twenty Questions. The funny name comes from the idea that, in the space of everything, ‘Mussolini’ and ‘bread’ are about as far away from each other as you can get.One round might go like this:Is it closer to Mussolini or bread? Mussolini.Is it closer to Mussolini or David Beckham? Uhh, I guess Mussolini. (Ok, they’re definitely thinking of a person.)Is it closer to Mussolini or Bill Clinton? Bill Clinton.Is it closer to Bill Clinton or Pelé? Bill Clinton, I think.Is it closer to Bill Clinton or Grace Hopper? Grace Hopper.Is it closer to Grace Hopper or Richard Hamming? Richard Hamming.Is it closer to Richard Hamming or Claude Shannon? You got it, I was thinking of Claude Shannon.Hopefully you get the point. By successively narrowing down the space of possible things or people, we’re able to guess almost anything.How is this game possible? Mussolini or Bread only works because you and I have a shared sense of semantics. Before we played this game, we never talked about whether Claude Shannon is semantically ‘closer’ to Mussolini or Beckham. We never even talked about what it means for two things to be ‘close’, even, or agreed on rules to the game.As you might imagine, the edge cases in M or B can be controversial. But I’ve played this game with many people and people tend to “just get it” on their first try. How is that possible?One explanation for why this game works is that there is only one way in which things are related, and this comes from the underlying world we live in. Put another way, our brains build up complicated models of the world in which we live, and the model of the world that my brain relies on is very similar to the one in yours. In fact, our brains’ models of the world are so similar...