WikiPath

The map to the left shows about 250,000 Wikipedia articles, laid out so that articles with similar meaning sit closer together. Each article gets fed through a language model that turns it into a long list of numbers (a vector). In that very high-dimensional space, position carries meaning, and what you see is a 2D projection of the space. Neighbors on screen are usually neighbors in meaning, though some squashing is unavoidable when you flatten hundreds of dimensions down to two.

The strange thing about a space like this is that you can do arithmetic on concepts instead of just numbers. The classic example: take the vector for "King", subtract the vector for "Man", and add the vector for "Woman", and you land roughly at the vector for "Queen". The gendered-royalty relationship is a literal direction you can travel.

Each axis at the bottom of the map is one of those directions, built by hand. Average a bunch of phrases describing one pole, then subtract the average of phrases describing the opposite. Stepping along an axis adds that direction to your current article's vector, then snaps to the real article that best matches the result. You move from where you are to whatever best fits "what you started with, plus the concept on that axis".

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