Google's New AI Technology Tested with 2,000-Year-Old Text

Google's AI Aeneas can fill in historical gaps in a flash, deciphering mysteries from Roman times.

According to BGR , human history is like a giant picture with many missing pieces due to the damage of ancient texts over time. Now, a groundbreaking AI model called Aeneas, developed by Google DeepMind and historians, promises to fill in those gaps, helping us understand the past with unprecedented accuracy and speed.

Google's New AI Unveils Humanity's Buried History

For centuries, historians have faced a formidable challenge in the form of ancient Roman texts, which are often found badly damaged, fragmented, or with faded text. Reconstructing them is like solving a difficult puzzle, requiring painstaking deduction and comparison. But a new technology is poised to change the game.

Ancient Texts Being Deciphered by Google DeepMind's AI Aeneas

PHOTO: NEOWIN SCREENSHOT

Named after a Greco-Roman mythological figure, Aeneas is an AI model developed jointly by historians from the University of Nottingham (UK) and scientists from Google DeepMind. It was trained to do what historians do: look for “similarities” (words, grammar, context) in a massive database of 176,000 Roman inscriptions to infer the missing pieces.

The difference is that while it might take a human weeks or even months, Aeneas can do this job in the blink of an eye.

Is AI trustworthy?

One of the biggest concerns with generative AI is the potential for “delusion”—the creation of false information. If we want to learn history accurately, AI “inventing” the past could have serious consequences.

To test its credibility, the team challenged Aeneas with the difficult task of determining the date of the “Res Gestae Divi Augusti,” a famous Roman text inscribed at the Temple of Augustus in Türkiye. The surprising result was that Aeneas’ AI came up with two possible dates, both of which were in perfect agreement with the estimates of most leading historians today.

The most important discovery of the study, however, was not that AI could replace humans, but that the combination of the two created superior power. When 23 historians worked alongside Aeneas, the results showed that:

• The productivity of historians was greatly accelerated.
• They may discover new connections that they never thought of before.
• A historian using Aeneas gives more accurate results than when using AI alone or humans working alone.

This technology not only helps decipher ancient texts, but also opens up a completely new method of historical research, helping us understand the past more deeply to shape a better future.

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/cong-nghe-ai-moi-cua-google-duoc-thu-thach-voi-van-ban-2000-nam-tuoi-185250726094725178.htm