Our Mission: Expanding the Horizon of Human Cognition

Abstraction as the foundation of humanity

The story of the evolution of Homo sapiens revolves fundamentally around our ability to create abstractions—from referring to an out-of-sight object, to creating tools and technology that have never existed, to juggling philosophical ideas that question the very existence of everything.

We created symbolic abstractions that can be commonly understood, called language. Then we can use language to communicate with each other. Those abstractions can be our inner feelings, everyday life, political ideologies, or scientific proofs.

We build abstractions upon abstractions. Without understanding arithmetic, we wouldn’t understand algebra; without algebra, we wouldn’t understand calculus; and without calculus, we wouldn’t understand partial differential equations or even more advanced mathematics.

New abstractions join the realm of known concepts to facilitate our interactions with the world. For instance, you likely started seeing a word more frequently immediately after learning it as a child. It is not because those words appeared all of a sudden; rather, only once you registered those patterns in your brain were you capable of recognizing them.

We are able to advance science because we stand on the shoulders of giants — we learn what the last generation has built and build something new for the next generation to learn; We are able to build new social structures because we have collective experience with old ones — we identify what makes people suffer more and create better societies for the next generation to experience.

The Human Ceiling

However, the sheer volume of abstraction one single human can learn and create is limited by our biological composition and lifespan. We are only able to advance our cognition generation by generation. It is a hard ceiling on the speed of our civilization’s advancement — the speed of a conversation or the pace of a page.

The Latent Vocabulary

Modern AI models have changed the game fundamentally for humanity. They have reconciled all digitalized information that human beings have ever created, possessing a huge amount of abstract building blocks to build new abstractions that are far beyond human capacity. In fact, in order to rationalize everything, even contradictory ideas and theories across all domains, they must develop new abstractions to facilitate their “thinking”.

Among those abstractions, some are completely off — those models developed spurious correlations—mathematical shortcuts to represent the complicated world; others are aligned with our understanding, truthfully restoring what’s behind the text. But that’s not all they have built. Not at all. They have also encoded what we have collectively felt but never named. Even more powerfully, they have created internal abstractions so subtle or vast that they could only be felt or thought if humans were able to process the same amount of information as those models can.

Our Mission

Our mission is to build a platform for a collective leap of human cognition. We want to leverage AI models to uncover those hidden abstractions formed in their latent space, integrating them into the cognitive toolkit of our species, upgrading the operating system of human thought.

We aren’t a closed laboratory, we are a community of thinkers, dreamers, and builders. By providing the tools and frameworks to navigate the latent space of AI, we invite everyone to help identify, name, and integrate these “abstractions” into our shared vocabulary.