Embedded 191,922 Met artworks to find hidden twins across 4k years

A couple of those are interesting, but most of them are just "a bowl looks like a bowl no matter what culture it's in".

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.

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.