[ExI] Why do the language model and the vision model align?

[Stefano Ticozzi]

Scientific thought has long since moved beyond Platonism, demonstrating
that:
1. Ideas do not exist independently of the human mind. Rather, they are
constructs we develop to optimize and structure our thinking.
2. Ideas are neither fixed, immutable, nor perfect; they evolve over time,
as does the world in which we live—in a Darwinian sense. For instance, the
concept of a sheep held by a human prior to the agricultural era would have
differed significantly from that held by a modern individual.

In my view, the convergence of AI “ideas” (i.e., language and visual
models) is more plausibly explained by a process of continuous
self-optimization, performed by systems that are trained on datasets and
information which are, at least to a considerable extent, shared across
models.

Ciao,
Stefano

Il sab 7 feb 2026, 12:57 John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> ha scritto:

> *Why do the language model and the vision model align? Because they’re
> both shadows of the same world*
> <https://www.quantamagazine.org/distinct-ai-models-seem-to-converge-on-how-they-encode-reality-20260107/?mc_cid=b288d90ab2&mc_eid=1b0caa9e8c>
>
> *The following quote is from the above: *
>
> *"More powerful AI models seem to have more similarities in their
> representations than weaker ones. Successful AI models are all alike, and
> every unsuccessful model is unsuccessful in its own particular way.[...] He
> would feed the pictures into the vision models and the captions into the
> language models, and then compare clusters of vectors in the two types. He
> observed a steady increase in representational similarity as models became
> more powerful. It was exactly what the Platonic representation hypothesis
> predicted."*
>
> *In my opinion the above finding has profound philosophical implications. *
>
> *John K Clark    See what's on my new list at  Extropolis
> <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>*
> qjq
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>
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