A New Chatbot Wants to Unlock the Secrets in Tattered Ancient Greek Records
The Austrian Academy of Science has launched Apollo, an advanced large language model designed to assist scholars in reconstructing and interpreting ancient Greek manuscripts. By filling in gaps in tattered papyri, the AI aims to accelerate historical research and uncover previously hidden information.
Why it matters
This tool significantly lowers the barrier to entry for complex historical research, potentially unlocking centuries of lost knowledge from damaged artifacts.
On Wednesday, the Austrian Academy of Science will release “the world’s first advanced large language model for Ancient Greek,” developed in partnership with French AI lab Mistral and technology services firm Sail Reply. The model, Apollo, is trained on roughly 600 million historical Greek words drawn from manuscripts, papyri, and inscriptions.
The model will be freely available to academics through a chatbot interface. The ambition is to help scholars to more rapidly identify papyrus fragments relevant to their specific sub-disciplines, as well as promising new avenues of research. Where documents are tattered and torn, Apollo is built to fill in the blanks with the most statistically likely words or passages, potentially revealing hidden details about historical events and practices.
Dimitris Vlitas, partner at Sail Reply, tells WIRED that unlocking knowledge in this way “was unthinkable a year ago.”
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