Identifying Quantum Structure in AI Language: Evidence for Evolutionary Convergence of Human and Artificial Cognition
This work identifies a novel quantum structure in AI language, potentially foundational for understanding cognition across human and artificial systems, though it is exploratory and not directly incremental.
The study found that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Gemini exhibit quantum-like structures, such as Bell's inequality violations and Bose-Einstein statistics in word distributions, mirroring results from human cognitive tests, suggesting evolutionary convergence between human and artificial cognition.
We present the results of cognitive tests on conceptual combinations, performed using specific Large Language Models (LLMs) as test subjects. In the first test, performed with ChatGPT and Gemini, we show that Bell's inequalities are significantly violated, which indicates the presence of 'quantum entanglement' in the tested concepts. In the second test, also performed using ChatGPT and Gemini, we instead identify the presence of 'Bose-Einstein statistics', rather than the intuitively expected 'Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics', in the distribution of the words contained in large-size texts. Interestingly, these findings mirror the results previously obtained in both cognitive tests with human participants and information retrieval tests on large corpora. Taken together, they point to the 'systematic emergence of quantum structures in conceptual-linguistic domains', regardless of whether the cognitive agent is human or artificial. Although LLMs are classified as neural networks for historical reasons, we believe that a more essential form of knowledge organization takes place in the distributive semantic structure of vector spaces built on top of the neural network. It is this meaning-bearing structure that lends itself to a phenomenon of evolutionary convergence between human cognition and language, slowly established through biological evolution, and LLM cognition and language, emerging much more rapidly as a result of self-learning and training. We analyze various aspects and examples that contain evidence supporting the above hypothesis. We also advance a unifying framework that explains the pervasive quantum organization of meaning that we identify.