Andreas Haupt

the artist

Stanford University, USA

Andreas Haupt is an Economist-Engineer from Germany who works on Machine Learning from Human Preferences.

the artwork

Komprimierte Individualität

German- Compressed Individuality - 2025 - digital

0 days - 1 hours - 34 minutes

audio commentary

Online platforms learn what users want, with a tendency for simplicity. This leads to a tension: Humans of infinite complexity, and their representation as a low-dimensional, simple set of numbers. How good can such representations be? Are most humans only different on a small number of dimensions? Can computational models represent us?

Andreas Haupt

mathematics in German culture

Germany was once a world center of mathematics, with Göttingen and Bonn fostering ideas but also aesthetics far beyond ordinary human experience. From Gauss’s precision to Noether’s symmetries, from Hilbert’s abstractions to Klein’s bottle, its scholars shaped modern thought. The picture shows a non-ordinary three-dimensional manifold, with only one side. I saw one of these early in my life, and was intrigued.

Andreas Haupt