DeepMind Unveils Aeneas: A Revolutionary AI Model for Ancient Texts
DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence research division, has recently launched Aeneas, an innovative AI model specifically designed to assist historians in decoding ancient texts. This groundbreaking model represents the first of its kind aimed at contextualizing historical inscriptions, with a detailed paper outlining its capabilities now available for public access.
Enhancing the Study of Ancient Languages
Aeneas empowers historians to extract new understanding from classical antiquity by facilitating the interpretation, attribution, and restoration of fragmented ancient writings. While originally trained for Latin, its architecture allows for potential adaptation to other ancient languages and scripts, vastly broadening its usability in the field of historical linguistics.
This model can effectively search for similar texts based on wording, syntax, and established formulas found across a multitude of Latin inscriptions. Additionally, it processes multimodal input to bridge gaps in text, significantly accelerating a process that has traditionally relied on the painstaking efforts of expert historians.
Aeneas: Named After a Mythical Hero
The name Aeneas pays homage to the legendary hero from ancient Greek and Roman lore, reflecting the model’s mission to build connections among historical narratives. Aeneas follows the path of its predecessor, Ithaca, which was specifically developed to enhance comprehension of Greek inscriptions.
According to DeepMind, “Aeneas goes a step further, assisting historians in interpreting and providing context for texts, linking isolated fragments, and offering a richer understanding of ancient history, ”as shared in a recent blog post.
Transforming Texts into Historical Fingerprints
Aeneas creates what can be described as a “historical fingerprint”for each text, encapsulating its content, language, provenance, and links to other inscriptions. This feature aids historians in situating these texts within a grander historical framework. Notably, Aeneas is built upon an extensive dataset encompassing more than 176, 000 Latin inscriptions, a compilation arising from decades of dedicated historical research.
Furthermore, DeepMind asserts that Aeneas surpasses existing general-purpose models in effectiveness, particularly concerning the chronological grouping of inscriptions. An interactive version of Aeneas is available at no cost for researchers, students, educators, and museum professionals to explore. Additionally, its source code and dataset can be accessed on DeepMind’s GitHub repository.
A Commitment to Cultural Preservation
Aeneas is part of Google’s expanding suite of tools dedicated to cultural preservation. In line with this commitment, the company recently upgraded its experimental AI initiative, Woolaroo, which enables users to learn endangered indigenous languages.
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