About

Since my childhood, I've been pondering the famous 3W questions: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? They followed me into adulthood, quietly shaping every decision I made, even the ones that looked purely practical on the surface.

I studied software engineering at Beihang University and computer science at Tsinghua University for pragmatic reasons. But the questions didn't stop just because I'd chosen a practical path. I took a class on Technology Philosophy — not because it was required, but because I couldn't help myself. Meanwhile, my technical work was pulling me toward the same territory from a completely different angle. I joined a research group specializing in Knowledge Graphs, and my focus was Entity Linking — the problem of connecting a mention in text to the specific entity it refers to in a structured knowledge base. It sounds narrowly technical, but at its core it's a deeply linguistic question: how does a symbol become meaning? How does a word point to a thing? That work gave me an intimate understanding of the Transformer architecture, but more importantly, it taught me to think about language as a bridge between minds and reality.

After graduating, I joined Google — another dream realized, just as studying at Tsinghua had been. But the childhood questions didn't care about career milestones. They came back harder: Why should I work so hard? Why do I exist? What is the purpose of human existence? When you carry questions like that and can't find answers, the weight becomes unbearable. Depression and anxiety took hold — the kind that keeps you awake most nights, that flattens the world into something gray and airless. It lasted about a year.

I don't say this for sympathy. I say it because those months taught me something no book could. When you're trapped inside your own mind, you become acutely aware of how much of your inner experience has no name. You feel things that are real, overwhelming, and completely illegible. I read extensively — philosophy, psychology, contemplative traditions, meditation techniques — and slowly found my way back. But I came away with a conviction: the experiences that nearly broke me weren't rare. Millions of people live through them. What's rare is having the language to make sense of them.

The recovery didn't just restore me — it opened doors I hadn't known existed. I spent two years learning an introductory course of various schools of Western and Oriental philosophy, and discussing them extensively with friends. It wasn't for credit or career advancement. It was because the questions that had driven me since childhood now felt urgent in a way they hadn't before. That course gave me the courage to question anything down to its foundations, the way philosophers have always done.

That philosophical grounding drew me to neuroscience. I wanted to understand how we build the mental models that let us navigate the world and ourselves. I read deeply enough that I gave a talk at an internal Google forum called "The Secrets of Our Brain" — an exploration of the question "Who are we?" through the lens of how our brains construct perception, concepts, and identity. Through that work, I came to understand in concrete, mechanistic terms how human beings build abstractions, and why those abstractions are the most powerful tools our species has ever created.

By then I'd been at Google for over five years. I was good at my job. But I always knew my real passion lived elsewhere — in the questions I couldn't stop asking. For a long time I didn't have the courage to act on that. Starting over felt too risky, too uncertain. With the encouragement from my friends and boyfriend, I finally took three months off — with the real possibility that I might not come back.

In January 2026, I went to Yunnan, China. My plan was simple: read whatever called to me, write whenever inspiration struck, and see what happened. Within days, I was pulled toward a question I couldn't let go of — what is fundamentally happening inside large language models? That obsession became an article: The Mathematical Mirror: LLMs and the Great Unknown.

I sent the article to Professor Jie Tang, the founder of z.ai, who invited me back to Tsinghua to present my thinking. While preparing that talk, something clicked. The philosophy class I took out of sheer curiosity, the Entity Linking research, the depression that left me stranded without language for my own experience, the neuroscience that showed me how abstraction works in the brain — they weren't separate chapters. They were all pointing at the same thing: our ability to name patterns is what gave us technological advancement and advanced civilization — and there are profound patterns that remain unnamed.

AI models have already processed the full breadth of digitized human knowledge. They have reconciled information across domains, cultures, and centuries in ways no single human mind ever could. Somewhere in that synthesis, there are latent abstractions — patterns in how the world works and how we experience being alive — that humanity has never crystallized into language. Not because they aren't real, but because no one has been in a position to see them. Until now.

That's why I built this project, together with a close friend, a former Google engineer whose talent I deeply admire. This is an invitation: join us in surfacing the unnamed, in bringing hidden abstractions into human vocabulary — so that all of us can think thoughts that were previously unthinkable.