Princess. Dragon. Kingdom. Knight.
Wait what?
So I’m on this website called Embeddings.fyi at like 2 in the morning because apparently that’s when I make my best life choices, and I click on “castle” just to see what happens. Next thing I know my screen explodes with all these related words floating around like some kind of semantic party I wasn’t invited to but somehow crashed anyway.
And honestly? It’s kind of magical.
The Thing Nobody Explains About Word Embeddings
Look, embeddings are basically… okay imagine you have a word, right? And instead of just being letters on a screen, it becomes this point floating in some impossible-to-visualize space where similar stuff hangs out together. Like a really exclusive club but for concepts.
Most people try to explain this with charts and math and I’m like nope. Not today.
Embeddings.fyi just says “here, click stuff and see what happens.” No login. No tutorial. No “please consider our premium features.” Just pure curiosity fuel.
You click “coffee” and suddenly “tea” and “caffeine” and “mug” show up like they’ve been waiting for you. Click “unicorn” and boom – “rainbow,” “mythical,” “fairy” all prance into view because OF COURSE unicorns travel with sparkly backup dancers.
It’s like each word has its own friend group and you’re just… watching them hang out?
Wait Actually This Gets Weirder
The AI learned all this from how we actually use language, which means it picked up our weird habits too. I clicked “galaxy” expecting space stuff and Samsung popped up. SAMSUNG. Because Samsung Galaxy phones, obviously. The AI is basically that friend who remembers everything you’ve ever said and makes connections you didn’t even realize you made. “Apple” brings up both “banana” (fruit friends) AND “Microsoft” (mortal enemies). “Python” gets you “snake” (the actual reptile) plus “Java” (fellow coding language).
The thing is… this isn’t a bug. This is exactly how our brains work too. Words don’t live in neat little boxes. They’re messy and contextual and sometimes “mercury” means the planet and sometimes it means that stuff in old thermometers that probably killed our grandparents.
You know that feeling when you’re trying to remember a word and your brain serves up three completely different options that somehow all make sense? That’s what this site shows you, except it’s the AI having that same moment.
I spent way too long clicking from word to word like some kind of semantic Wikipedia rabbit hole. “Castle” → “princess” → “fairy tale” → … I honestly don’t remember but I ended up at “dystopia” somehow and that felt very 2024.
Oh and Another Thing
The site doesn’t try to teach you anything. There’s no “Learning Objectives” or “By the end of this module you will understand…” It just exists. You poke it, it responds. Very zen. Very “figure it out yourself.”
Which is probably why it works? I learned more about how AI understands language in 20 minutes of random clicking than I did from reading actual papers about vector spaces and cosine similarity and whatever other math nightmares they use to make this stuff work.
It’s like… you know when someone explains a joke and it stops being funny? This is the opposite. The more you play with it, the more you get it.
Also it’s free which in this economy feels illegal but I’m not complaining.
Who Even Is This For
Honestly? Everyone.
- That student who zones out during lectures but could spend hours on TikTok
- The writer looking for weird word combinations
- The data scientist who wants to watch their precious vectors dance around like tiny semantic ballerinas
- Your grandma who’s curious about “the AI thing” but doesn’t want to install anything or create accounts or deal with any of that nonsense
It’s just… there. Waiting. Like a really good conversation starter at a party where everyone’s too shy to talk.
And Then I Closed the Tab
But here’s the thing – it stuck with me. Not in a “wow I learned so much” way but in a “huh, that was actually kind of beautiful” way.
Words having friends. Concepts clustering together like they’re gossiping at lunch. The AI accidentally revealing how weird and wonderful human language actually is.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe it’s just a cool demo. But there’s something about watching abstract ideas become… tangible? playful? that hits different.
If you’re curious about how machines think about language, or if you just want to waste 20 minutes clicking on words and seeing what happens, you know where to find me. I’ll be the one following trails of princesses and dragons, getting happily lost in vector space, wondering how I ended up here but not really wanting to leave.
