1. An MIT professor who works on similar geometry alignment problems didn't want to work on this with me because he was certain we would need at least a little bit of paired data
2. A vector database startup founder who told me about his plan to randomly rotate embeddings to guarantee user security (and ignored me when I said it might not be a good idea)
The practical takeaway is something that many people already understood, which is that embeddings are not encrypted, even if you don't have access to the model that produced them.
As one example, in the Cursor security policy (https://www.cursor.com/security#codebase-indexing) they state:
> Embedding reversal: academic work has shown that reversing embeddings is possible in some cases. Current attacks rely on having access to the model [...]
This is no longer the case. Since all embedding models are learning ~the same thing, we can decode any embedding vectors, given we have at least a few thousand of them.