The Musk Foundation, led by billionaire Elon Musk, has made a hefty donation of $2,084,000 to fully fund the second stage of AI project, the Vesuvius Challenge. This project uses artificial intelligence to decode ancient, unreadable scrolls.
What Happened: Nat Friedman, former CEO of GitHub, announced on Friday the substantial contribution from the Musk Foundation to the Vesuvius Challenge, a project aimed at using AI to decipher ancient scrolls.
The project, initiated by Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Brent Seales, made considerable strides by successfully using AI to read complete paragraphs from charred scrolls from the Roman city of Herculaneum preserved by the Vesuvius volcanic eruption.
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According to Friedman’s tweet, the other generous donations received will be used to speed up the work on scanning at scale, which should eventually convert at a rate of roughly one dollar for one word of recovered ancient text.
The scrolls are said to have been owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.
Why It Matters: The Vesuvius Challenge, started a year ago, has been designed to crack the code of the Herculaneum Papyri, a set of ancient papyrus scrolls charred by the Vesuvius eruption almost two thousand years ago.
The project, which offered over $1M in rewards, attracted a global pool of competitors and collaborators, aiming to solve the riddle using computer vision, machine learning, and sheer determination.
The hefty donation from the Musk Foundation will expedite the process of decoding these ancient texts, bringing to light the secrets they hold and contributing to civilizational enlightenment.
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