Ask A Genius 1364: AI, Vector Spaces, and the Rise of a Synthetic Universal Language
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/05/07
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Do you think computers and AI will eventually find a universal language—some way to encode all possible human languages?
Rosner: To the extent that that’s a thing, Google is already doing something like it. Google Translate, for example, has this meta-structure. I haven’t read about it recently, but a few years ago, I read that it uses a kind of abstract, black-box intermediary space.
It’s not just doing direct word-for-word translation between language pairs. Instead, it creates a shared internal representation—a meta-language. Some researchers have suggested that specific “nodes” or regions act like universal conceptual placeholders within this space. So if you have a concept like lovethat shows up across all human languages, there’s a location in that space where love lives, regardless of how it’s expressed linguistically.
Jacobsen: So it’s not a word, exactly—is it more like a position in some abstract vector space?
Rosner: Yeah, exactly. You could call it a “synthetic Ur-language,” or a landscape that can accommodate most languages by bending or deforming itself to their structure. To use the cliché: Inuit languages have a rich vocabulary around snow, so that region of the conceptual space is more densely populated for them, with more distinctions and granularity—the shape of the landscape shifts depending on cultural priorities and sensory experience. So, regarding your question, it’s already happening. The beginnings of a universal encoding structure for human languages are in play.
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