Embedded 191,922 Met artworks to find hidden twins across 4k years(jmp1062.github.io)
jmp1062.github.io
Embedded 191,922 Met artworks to find hidden twins across 4k years
https://jmp1062.github.io/met-weirdest-art/
2 comments
I fetched every Met Museum CC0 artwork with a published image, generated CLIP embeddings for all 191,922 of them, and searched for visually near-identical pairs separated by 2,000+ years. I used Cursor (Opus 4.7, max effort) to help build it, including spinning up a ~500 vCPU Burla cluster for the image downloads and embedding jobs. I also had it study popular museum websites for design inspiration while building the site. The full pipeline took about 50 minutes.
The one that struck me most was the pair of green vases, but even then, it's mostly that a vase is a vase. The patterns are superficially similar, in that they're both banded with geometric and figurative bands, but if they weren't the same color I don't think people would say that they're all that much alike.
Some are wildly off. It says that a bed frame looks like both a stick and a trivet. It doesn't look at all like either one.