What began as a desire to create an engaging website animation led to the accidental invention of a cognitive task and launched a research-to-product pipeline spanning AHAB, English Word Atlas, and ultimately Synapse.
Initial Idea
The goal was to create an animated demonstration of an LLM playing semantic word games for a personal website, showcasing how language models navigate relationships between words and concepts.
Accidental Discovery
While developing this animation concept, the word discrimination task emerged organically as an unplanned discovery. The task requires participants to identify the "odd one out" from a set of four words.
This mechanic turned out to be effective for measuring semantic judgment quality and evaluating alignment between human and AI understanding. The discovery launched the research pipeline that would eventually become Synapse.