How Reports From The Future Draws Its Star Maps

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0800

TL;DR

Reports From The Future maps AI-related vocabulary as it emerges, aiming to spot “semantic basins of attraction” - ideas circulating in tech discourse before they have a settled name - across six months of arXiv papers and three months of web discourse (X, HuggingFace blogs, Hacker News, LessWrong).
All three plates share a pipeline: documents are embedded into vectors, UMAP reduces them to a drawable space (fit once and frozen, so the sky doesn’t scramble week to week), and HDBSCAN clusters dense regions into constellations, leaving outliers as unassigned “dust” rather than forcing them into a group.
Plate I (the Research Sky) names constellations with TF-IDF only, and corrects each month’s colour for publishing rate rather than raw count - a fix that moves August from 6% to about 70% of the May peak once partial and weekend-heavy days are properly weighted.
Plate II (the Attention Sky) runs HDBSCAN twice, once over a rolling 91-day background for context and once per week at a smaller threshold for the constellations actually drawn, and names clusters with raw TF-IDF terms on the view that a badly-formed name is itself information about unsettled vocabulary.
Plate III (the Emergent Sky) reuses Plate II’s clusters but adds a “name gap” metric - the percentile-rank difference between semantic and lexical coherence - to separate genuinely emerging concepts (high shared meaning, low shared vocabulary) from buzzwords (high shared vocabulary, low shared meaning), each routed through a different, deliberately inverted naming prompt.
The naming pipeline for Plate III runs four models independently to describe each cluster, then has one model synthesise a name from where their descriptions converge, and a final model distil that into a short phrase - illustrated with a real example of “Claude” being described mid-genericide as a term coming apart rather than settling on a single referent.

Key Takeaways

Data Visualization on Eigenform Articles

How Reports From The Future Draws Its Star Maps