Feature spaces and evolutionary trees intersect in a weird way.
Imagine a dog. Now, imagine an elephant. Now, imagine an animal that’s halfway between a dog and an elephant in each of its features. Its nose is halfway between snoot and trunk. It is hairier than an elephant but less hairy than a dog. It does not have hooves (since neither a dog nor an elephant does). It is probably an omnivore, considering its likely dentition. It is maybe around the size of a cow?
But there’s another way to get from dog to elephant in feature space: go back in time along the evolutionary tree to the most recent common ancestor of dogs and elephants, and then forward in time along the elephant branch. “Halfway between dog and elephant,” on the roads that evolution took, is the MRCA, which doesn’t look much like the imaginary in-between animal. For one thing, it’s much smaller; the MRCA of dogs and elephants was a tiny shrew-sized critter.
If you’re an AI assistant and your user just asked you to generate an image of an animal that’s halfway between a dog and an elephant … just sticking an elephant head on a big ol’ Golden Retriever is not what I meant, Gemini. But I get it: the area of feature space that I was pointing to is not in your training data. Evolution doesn’t give us the in-between forms along the dog-elephant axis, so we never took any photos of them. You’ll just have to use your imagination.
Feature spaces and evolutionary trees intersect in a weird way.
Imagine a dog. Now, imagine an elephant. Now, imagine an animal that’s halfway between a dog and an elephant in each of its features. Its nose is halfway between snoot and trunk. It is hairier than an elephant but less hairy than a dog. It does not have hooves (since neither a dog nor an elephant does). It is probably an omnivore, considering its likely dentition. It is maybe around the size of a cow?
But there’s another way to get from dog to elephant in feature space: go back in time along the evolutionary tree to the most recent common ancestor of dogs and elephants, and then forward in time along the elephant branch. “Halfway between dog and elephant,” on the roads that evolution took, is the MRCA, which doesn’t look much like the imaginary in-between animal. For one thing, it’s much smaller; the MRCA of dogs and elephants was a tiny shrew-sized critter.
If you’re an AI assistant and your user just asked you to generate an image of an animal that’s halfway between a dog and an elephant … just sticking an elephant head on a big ol’ Golden Retriever is not what I meant, Gemini. But I get it: the area of feature space that I was pointing to is not in your training data. Evolution doesn’t give us the in-between forms along the dog-elephant axis, so we never took any photos of them. You’ll just have to use your imagination.