The Worlds I see

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This was my father’s true talent—not engineering, or camera repair, or even puns. He had a virtuosity for unearthing the happiness waiting to be discovered in any situation, no matter how mundane.

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Now, still breathless from my first brush with real discovery, I found myself searching the skies for a North Star of my own: the kind of idea—a question, a hypothesis, a bet—that any scientist worth their stripes would chase to the ends of the earth. Beyond, even.

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Whether realistic or conceptual, sentimental or political, art harnesses those hundreds of millions of years of hard-won evolution to linger on the sheer joy of interpreting the world through the eyes—and, thus, the sensibilities—of the individual.

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My Princeton professors often said that postgraduate studies weren’t just another academic milestone but a turning point, representing the first transition from being a student to becoming something like a true scientist, turning a passion into a journey and an affinity into an identity, tempering an education to become the foundation of a career, a reputation, and a life.

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It soon becomes clear that there’s no separating the two; to see is to understand, making the challenge every bit as intellectual as it is sensory. Vision, therefore, is not merely an application of our intelligence. It is, for all practical purposes, synonymous with our intelligence.

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The puzzle of vision is about much more than understanding how we see. It isn’t simply a question of colors or shapes, or even of number crunching at ever-larger scales. It’s an investigation into a phenomenon at the very core of our cognition, from which so much of who and what we are springs forth, biologically, interpersonally, and culturally. It’s a journey to the most foundational layers of our experience. So often, to see is to know. Understanding how we see, therefore, is to understand ourselves.

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It may seem trivial, but moments like these were exactly what motivated my obsession. They’re what vision is truly about. It’s not merely a “sense,” at least not in the way a thermometer or Geiger counter “senses,” but rather the catalyst of an experience. A flood of information and emotions alike, unleashed by the color of a gas station sign speeding by at fifty miles per hour. It’s among the capabilities that define a mind at its most human—a point of entry to a whole universe of memories, associations, concepts, and reasoning, all woven into our visual connections to the world around us.

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There’s just so much to know about life, I thought. And so much of it comes in through the eyes. I felt it in my gut and in my heart. ImageNet may have been doomed, but its goal was no less worthy. Sooner or later, someone would crack it. And when they did—when the whole of this world of ours came spilling into the minds of our machines, with all its color and chaos and mundane magic—everything would change.

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At times, AMT felt like the human psychophysics experiments Christof and I conducted at Caltech—attempting to extract some subtle but essential piece of information from a stranger’s perception—blown up to a global scale.

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In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I worried that a place like “home” might be too comfortable for times like these. Moving somewhere new appealed to me precisely because it wasn’t comfortable. It felt uncertain—maybe even risky—and I needed that.

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Given all the work we’d done, I found it reductive to think of ImageNet as merely a data set. Even now—especially now, with the contest close at hand—it was a hypothesis. It was a bet that what our field needed most was access to the diversity and variation that human perception had been weaned on for millennia.

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Back in the 1970s, the researcher and mathematician Anatol Holt summed up this myopia by saying that AI was a technology that can make a perfect chess move while the room is on fire. How relevant that diagnosis still felt, even now.

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We see the world holistically, not just identifying but understanding its contents—their relationships, their meanings, their pasts, and their futures. The gist. We aren’t merely witnesses, but storytellers.

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I wondered, in fact, if the true value of the North Star as a metaphor wasn’t just its ability to guide but the fact that its distance remains perpetually infinite. It can be pursued until the point of exhaustion, the object of a lifetime’s obsession, but never be reached. It’s a symbol of the scientist’s most distinctive trait: a curiosity so restless that it repels satisfaction, like opposing magnets, forever. A star in the night, a mirage in the distance, a road without end.

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Words continued to fail. “Phenomenon” was too passive. “Disruption” too brash. “Revolution” too self-congratulatory. Modern AI was revealing itself to be a puzzle, and one whose pieces bore sharp edges.

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In the real world, there’s one North Star—Polaris, the brightest in the Ursa Minor constellation. But in the mind, such navigational guides are limitless. Each new pursuit—each new obsession—hangs in the dark over its horizon, another gleaming trace of iridescence, beckoning. That’s why my greatest joy comes from knowing that this journey will never be complete. Neither will I. There will always be something new to chase. To a scientist, the imagination is a sky full of North Stars.

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