Ted Chiang predicted this in "Arrival." The difference is that it's not an alien language, but a machine one
Here's what most people missed: AI-to-AI language already exists. It just doesn't look like language with symbols and sounds.
It's geometry in 4,096-dimensional space. A single vector in a multi-dimensional space carries as much meaning as hundreds of words in English.
Three independent groups empirically confirmed this: Princeton, Stanford2, and Microsoft3 (2024–2025).
This geometric AI-to-AI language is 24x faster4 than any human language and significantly more accurate and precise (it's pure mathematics).
The parallel with Villeneuve's Arrival7 is obvious here - the heptapods also thought in whole concepts, not in sequential words. Only instead of ink circles, we have tensors in latent space.
Ted Chiang was closer to reality than he probably thought.
But a large language model is not a writer; it's not even a user of language.9
Ted ChiangScience fiction writerPhotograph by Arturo Villarrubia, cropped, CC BY-SA 2.0References
- Johnson, W. B. and Lindenstrauss, J., Extensions of Lipschitz Mappings into a Hilbert Space, Contemporary Mathematics 26, 189-206 (American Mathematical Society, 1984) - the theorem behind the packing argument - https://doi.org/10.1090/conm/026/737400↩
- Zou, J., Qiu, R., Li, G., Yang, X., et al., Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems (arXiv:2511.20639, 25 November 2025; ICML 2026 Spotlight) - Princeton and Stanford - https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20639↩
- Liu, Y., Huang, Y., Yao, J., Feng, S., et al., DroidSpeak: KV Cache Sharing for Cross-LLM Communication and Multi-LLM Serving (arXiv:2411.02820, 5 November 2024) - Microsoft Research - https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.02820↩
- Du, Z., Wang, R., Bai, H., Cao, Z., et al., Enabling Agents to Communicate Entirely in Latent Space (arXiv:2511.09149, 12 November 2025; accepted to ACL 2026) - the 24x figure - https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09149↩
- Cayley, A., A Memoir on the Theory of Matrices, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 148, 17-37 (1858) - where the operation is defined - https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1858.0002↩
- Fawzi, A., Balog, M., Huang, A., et al., Discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning, Nature 610, 47-53 (2022) - AlphaTensor - https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05172-4↩
- Chiang, T., Story of Your Life, in Starlight 2, ed. Patrick Nielsen Hayden (Tor, 1998)↩
- Ricci-Curbastro, G. and Levi-Civita, T., Méthodes de calcul différentiel absolu et leurs applications, Mathematische Annalen 54, 125-201 (1900) - the founding paper of tensor calculus - https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01454201↩
- Chiang, T., Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Art, The New Yorker, 31 August 2024 - source of the quotation - https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/why-ai-isnt-going-to-make-art↩