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

[Jason Resch]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 10:27 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Feb 11, 2026, 8:27 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 9:21 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> *>> What's surprising to me is that an AI that was only trained on words
>>>> can converge on ANYTHING, let alone to something congruent to the real
>>>> world. If we had access to an extra terrestrial's library that was huge but
>>>> contained no pictures, just 26 different types of squiggles arranged into
>>>> many trillions of words, I don't see how we could ever make any sense out
>>>> of it, I don't see how we could ever write a new sentence in ET's language
>>>> that was not only grammatically correct but also expressed an idea that was
>>>> true and non-trivial; but somehow an AI could. Don't ask me how.*
>>>>
>>>
>>> *> An ideal compression of Wikipedia would require not only
>>> understanding all the grammar of our languages, but also how our minds
>>> think, and what our world looks like and how it behaves. Our base 10
>>> numerical representation system would quickly fall to such compression,
>>> given all the numbered lists that so commonly appear across the site.*
>>>
>>
>> *In general it's impossible to prove that you're using the ideal
>> compression algorithm on your data, for all you know there might be a way
>> to compress it even more.*
>>
>
>
> Not impossible, just computationally infeasible.
> For example, we can brute force determine whether we've found the shortest
> compression of a 40-bit string by iterating over all 2^40 strings of
> shorter length, then choosing the shortest.
>


Correction: You were right on this. I had forgotten to consider that some
of those shorter strings are programs that may or may not halt, and since
we can't know if they might one day print out the target string one day and
halt, we can't rule them out as possibly shorter compressions of the 40-bit
string in question. This makes it uncomputable even if we can iterate over
every possible program of a finite length.

Jason

>
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