Semantic Phonons: Lattice Vibrations in AI Internals

Phonons refer to collective vibrational modes in crystals, propagating through the lattice as a wave.IntroductionOne of the most pressing questions in AI research is how language models represent meaning. How does a model know that "excellent" is better than "good"? How does a model represent time scales, e.g., hour vs. day? Where does the knowledge live that July comes after June? Language models are trained to predict text, and they are very good at doing so, but our understanding of their int...