#Nat Friedman

[themightyacilius]

Tweets of the Week: 12 February 2024

Ken Layne is impressed by the British monarch: Kudos to king Charles for being a real ally to women Grammys winners, even when has hard times personally. https://t.co/J4IwGlm5Wu— Ken Layne (@KenLayne) February 6, 2024 The most important news story of the last several years: Ten months ago, we launched the Vesuvius Challenge to solve the ancient problem of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of…

[richdadpoor]

Silicon Valley Tech Moguls Want to Build a New City in California

When rich people start buying up land, it’s always fairly disturbing. If and when those same people start telling you that they’re going to use the land to make the world a better place, it’d only be natural to feel certifiably creeped out. Unfortunately, this is what’s been happening in northern California, where some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent bigwigs have snatched up a huge amount of…

[blueiscoool]

Three Students Just Deciphered the First Passages of a 2,000-Year-Old Scroll Burned in Vesuvius’ Eruption

A Roman scroll, partially preserved when it was buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, has been virtually unwrapped and decoded using artificial intelligence.

The feat was achieved by three contestants in the Vesuvius Challenge, a competition launched in March 2023 in which people around the world raced to read the ancient Herculaneum papyri.

Papyrologists working with the Vesuvius Challenge believe the scroll contains “never-before-seen text from antiquity,” and the text in question is a piece of Epicurean philosophy on the subject of pleasure. The winning submission shows ancient Greek letters on a large patch of scroll, and the author seems to be discussing the question: are things that are scarce more pleasurable as a result?

The author, whose identity is unconfirmed, doesn’t think so: “As too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” one passage from the scroll reads.

The three members of the winning team had previously individually made significant contributions to the competition. Luke Farritor, a computer science student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Youssef Nader, a machine learning Ph.D. student at Freie University in Berlin, had been two of the first contestants to detect a smaller number of letters, winning $40,000 and $10,000 respectively. Julian Schilliger, a robotics student at ETH Zürich, developed a tool that began to automatically segment the scrolls. They will share the $700,000 grand prize.

Nat Friedman, a tech investor and executive, and one of the challenge’s organizers, recently printed out the winning submission. “All this has been in this dreamlike digital world in my imagination before," Friedman says. "Seeing it on paper, rolling it up, it just made it so tangible.”

There’s a lot more to discover. The scroll partially decoded by the winning submission was one of 800 discovered in a southern Italian villa that was first uncovered in 1750. The combined efforts of the competitors and organizers so far have resulted in around 5% of one scroll being read.

The final scramble to read the scrolls

Since the Vesuvius Challenge launched nearly a year ago, participants had both cooperated and competed, sharing their latest techniques with each other and posting pictures of their progress. But as the race for the grand prize intensified, the Discord, a social media platform where the participants shared information, went dark, says Friedman.

Of the eighteen submissions for the grand prize, most of them were received on the last day of the contest, Dec. 31, and three were sent in the final ten minutes, according to Friedman. Friedman recalls he was at home with his family around Christmas, decorating for the holiday while compulsively refreshing his phone, when the winning submission came in. “I ran into my little office at home and popped it open,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow, this is really magnificent.’”

In accordance with the criteria set in March 2023, the winning submission contains four passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of the characters in each of those passages recoverable by professional papyrologists. It also contains a further 11 columns of text.

It isn’t known who authored the ancient scroll, but experts have developed theories. “Is the author Epicurus' follower, the philosopher and poet Philodemus, the teacher of Vergil? It seems very likely,” writes Richard Janko, professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan. “Is he writing about the effect of music on the hearer, and comparing it to other pleasures like those of food and drink? Quite probably.” Robert Fowler, a professor of Greek at the University of Bristol, also believes the author to be Philodemus. “Like other Epicureans, he valued pleasure above all - but pleasure rightly understood, not mere indulgence,” Fowler writes of the philosopher.

In the final section of the scroll, the author appears to criticize his intellectual adversaries, who “have nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or in particular, when it is a question of definition.”

“I can't help but read it as a 2000 year old blog post, arguing with another poster,” says Friedman. “It's ancient Substack, and people are beefing with each other, and I think that's just amazing.”

What comes next

The Vesuvius Challenge has issued a new grand prize for 2024 that will allow the AI-enhanced decoding to move at a faster pace.

The competitors largely have been developing algorithms for automatic letter detection—using AI to see traces of ink on segments of virtually unrolled scrolls. Aside from letter detection, the other main challenge associated with reading the scrolls is segmentation—separating the layers and virtually unrolling the scrolls. So far, this process has been highly manual; the Vesuvius Challenge employed three full-time segmenters. In order to ensure that they’d have segmented enough of the scroll for someone to win the grand prize, Friedman bought the team new monitors and computers to boost their productivity. The challenge for 2024 is to automate the segmentation process.

Friedman admits that he has had other tempting offers of new quests to pursue. Over the last year, he says his inbox has been filled with Robinson Crusoe-esque proposals, from people alerting him to lost shipwrecks and ancient cities, undecoded languages, and strange glyphs on the sides of mountains.

But he can’t walk away. He wants to help read all of the 800 scrolls already discovered in the villa. And some archeologists believe there is a main library containing tens of thousands of scrolls, still waiting to be excavated.

To expedite the excavation, Friedman has obtained the mobile number of the Italian civil servant responsible for the villa, whom he has texted, twice. “My hope is that I won't have to go and dig it out myself,” says Friedman. “But if that's what it comes to, I will.”

By WILL HENSHALL.

[deargodsno]

Two thousand years ago, a volcanic eruption buried an ancient library of papyrus scrolls now known as the Herculaneum Papyri. In the 18th century the scrolls were discovered. More than 800 of them are now stored in a library in Naples, Italy; these lumps of carbonized ash cannot be opened without severely damaging them. But how can we read them if they remain rolled up? On March 15th, 2023, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, and Brent Seales launched the Vesuvius Challenge to answer this question. Scrolls from the Institut de France were imaged at the Diamond Light Source particle accelerator near Oxford. We released these high-resolution CT scans of the scrolls, and we offered more than $1M in prizes, put forward by many generous donors. A global community of competitors and collaborators assembled to crack the problem with computer vision, machine learning, and hard work. Less than a year later, in December 2023, they succeeded. Finally, after 275 years, we can begin to read the scrolls. Grand Prize​ There was one submission that stood out clearly from the rest. Working independently, each member of our team of papyrologists recovered more text from this submission than any other. Remarkably, the entry achieved the criteria we set when announcing the Vesuvius Challenge in March: 4 passages of 140 characters each, with at least 85% of characters recoverable. This was not a given: most of us on the organizing team assigned a less than 30% probability of success when we announced these criteria! And in addition, the submission includes another 11 (!) columns of text — more than 2000 characters total. The results of this review were clear and unanimous: the Vesuvius Challenge Grand Prize of $700,000 is awarded to a team of three for their excellent submission. Congratulations to Youssef Nader, Luke Farritor, and Julian Schilliger! Runners up​ Of the remaining submissions, the scores from our team of papyrologists identify a three-way tie for runner up. These entries show remarkably similar readability to each other, but still stand out from the rest by being significantly more readable. Congratulations to the following teams, each taking home $50,000! Shao-Qian Mah. GitHub Elian Rafael Dal Prá, Sean Johnson, Leonardo Scabini, Raí Fernando Dal Prá, João Vitor Brentigani Torezan, Daniel Baldin Franceschini, Bruno Pereira Kellm, Marcelo Soccol Gris, and Odemir Martinez Bruno. GitHub Louis Schlessinger and Arefeh Sherafati. GitHub

What does the scroll say?​ To date, our efforts have managed to unroll and read about 5% of the first scroll. Our eminent team of papyrologists has been hard at work and has achieved a preliminary transcription of all the revealed columns. We now know that this scroll is not a duplicate of an existing work; it contains never-before-seen text from antiquity. The papyrology team are preparing to deliver a comprehensive study as soon as they can. You all gave them a lot of work to do! Initial readings already provide glimpses into this philosophical text. From our scholars: The general subject of the text is pleasure, which, properly understood, is the highest good in Epicurean philosophy. In these two snippets from two consecutive columns of the scroll, the author is concerned with whether and how the availability of goods, such as food, can affect the pleasure which they provide. Do things that are available in lesser quantities afford more pleasure than those available in abundance? Our author thinks not: “as too in the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant.” However, is it easier for us naturally to do without things that are plentiful? “Such questions will be considered frequently.” Since this is the end of a scroll, this phrasing may suggest that more is coming in subsequent books of the same work. At the beginning of the first text, a certain Xenophantos is mentioned, perhaps the same man — presumably a musician — also mentioned by Philodemus in his work On Music. Richard Janko writes: “Is the author Epicurus' follower, the philosopher and poet Philodemus, the teacher of Vergil? It seems very likely. Is he writing about the effect of music on the hearer, and comparing it to other pleasures like those of food and drink? Quite probably. Does this text come from his four-part treatise on music, of which we know Book 4? Quite possibly: the title should soon become available to read. Is the Xenophantus who is mentioned the celebrated flute-player, or the man famous in antiquity for being unable to control his laughter, or someone else entirely? So many questions! But improvements to the identification of the ink, which can be expected, will soon answer most of them. I can hardly wait.” Scholars might call it a philosophical treatise. But it seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life. Is Philodemus throwing shade at the stoics in his closing paragraph, asserting that stoicism is an incomplete philosophy because it has “nothing to say about pleasure?” The questions he seems to discuss — life’s pleasures and what makes life worth living — are still on our minds today. We can expect many more works from Philodemus in the current collection, once we’re able to scale up this technique. But there could be other text as well — an Aristotle dialog, a lost history of Livy, a lost Homeric epic work, a poem from Sappho — who knows what treasures are hidden in these lumps of ash.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

A few years ago, during one of California’s steadily worsening wildfire seasons, Nat Friedman’s family home burned down. A few months after that, Friedman was in Covid-19 lockdown in the Bay Area, both freaked out and bored. Like many a middle-aged dad, he turned for healing and guidance to ancient Rome. While some of us were watching Tiger King and playing with our kids’ Legos, he read books about the empire and helped his daughter make paper models of Roman villas. Instead of sourdough, he learned to bake Panis Quadratus, a Roman loaf pictured in some of the frescoes found in Pompeii. During sleepless pandemic nights, he spent hours trawling the internet for more Rome stuff. That’s how he arrived at the Herculaneum papyri, a fork in the road that led him toward further obsession. He recalls exclaiming: “How the hell has no one ever told me about this?”

The Herculaneum papyri are a collection of scrolls whose status among classicists approaches the mythical. The scrolls were buried inside an Italian countryside villa by the same volcanic eruption in 79 A.D. that froze Pompeii in time. To date, only about 800 have been recovered from the small portion of the villa that’s been excavated. But it’s thought that the villa, which historians believe belonged to Julius Caesar’s prosperous father-in-law, had a huge library that could contain thousands or even tens of thousands more. Such a haul would represent the largest collection of ancient texts ever discovered, and the conventional wisdom among scholars is that it would multiply our supply of ancient Greek and Roman poetry, plays and philosophy by manyfold. High on their wish lists are works by the likes of Aeschylus, Sappho and Sophocles, but some say it’s easy to imagine fresh revelations about the earliest years of Christianity.

“Some of these texts could completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world,” says Robert Fowler, a classicist and the chair of the Herculaneum Society, a charity that tries to raise awareness of the scrolls and the villa site. “This is the society from which the modern Western world is descended.”

The reason we don’t know exactly what’s in the Herculaneum papyri is, y’know, volcano. The scrolls were preserved by the voluminous amount of superhot mud and debris that surrounded them, but the knock-on effects of Mount Vesuvius charred them beyond recognition. The ones that have been excavated look like leftover logs in a doused campfire. People have spent hundreds of years trying to unroll them—sometimes carefully, sometimes not. And the scrolls are brittle. Even the most meticulous attempts at unrolling have tended to end badly, with them crumbling into ashy pieces.

In recent years, efforts have been made to create high-resolution, 3D scans of the scrolls’ interiors, the idea being to unspool them virtually. This work, though, has often been more tantalizing than revelatory. Scholars have been able to glimpse only snippets of the scrolls’ innards and hints of ink on the papyrus. Some experts have sworn they could see letters in the scans, but consensus proved elusive, and scanning the entire cache is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the deepest-pocketed patrons. Anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery.

But Friedman wasn’t your average Rome-loving dad. He was the chief executive officer of GitHub Inc., the massive software development platform that Microsoft Corp. acquired in 2018. Within GitHub, Friedman had been developing one of the first coding assistants powered by artificial intelligence, and he’d seen the rising power of AI firsthand. He had a hunch that AI algorithms might be able to find patterns in the scroll images that humans had missed.

After studying the problem for some time and ingratiating himself with the classics community, Friedman, who’s left GitHub to become an AI-focused investor, decided to start a contest. Last year he launched the Vesuvius Challenge, offering $1 million in prizes to people who could develop AI software capable of reading four passages from a single scroll. “Maybe there was obvious stuff no one had tried,” he recalls thinking. “My life has validated this notion again and again.”

As the months ticked by, it became clear that Friedman’s hunch was a good one. Contestants from around the world, many of them twentysomethings with computer science backgrounds, developed new techniques for taking the 3D scans and flattening them into more readable sheets. Some appeared to find letters, then words. They swapped messages about their work and progress on a Discord chat, as the often much older classicists sometimes looked on in hopeful awe and sometimes slagged off the amateur historians.

On Feb. 5, Friedman and his academic partner Brent Seales, a computer science professor and scroll expert, plan to reveal that a group of contestants has delivered transcriptions of many more than four passages from one of the scrolls. While it’s early to draw any sweeping conclusions from this bit of work, Friedman says he’s confident that the same techniques will deliver far more of the scrolls’ contents. “My goal,” he says, “is to unlock all of them.”

Before Mount Vesuvius erupted, the town of Herculaneum sat at the edge of the Gulf of Naples, the sort of getaway wealthy Romans used to relax and think. Unlike Pompeii, which took a direct hit from the Vesuvian lava flow, Herculaneum was buried gradually by waves of ash, pumice and gases. Although the process was anything but gentle, most inhabitants had time to escape, and much of the town was left intact under the hardening igneous rock. Farmers first rediscovered the town in the 18th century, when some well-diggers found marble statues in the ground. In 1750 one of them collided with the marble floor of the villa thought to belong to Caesar’s father-in-law, Senator Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, known to historians today as Piso.

During this time, the first excavators who dug tunnels into the villa to map it were mostly after more obviously valuable artifacts, like the statues, paintings and recognizable household objects. Initially, people who ran across the scrolls, some of which were scattered across the colorful floor mosaics, thought they were just logs and threw them on a fire. Eventually, though, somebody noticed the logs were often found in what appeared to be libraries or reading rooms, and realized they were burnt papyrus. Anyone who tried to open one, however, found it crumbling in their hands.

Terrible things happened to the scrolls in the many decades that followed. The scientif-ish attempts to loosen the pages included pouring mercury on them (don’t do that) and wafting a combination of gases over them (ditto). Some of the scrolls have been sliced in half, scooped out and generally abused in ways that still make historians weep. The person who came the closest in this period was Antonio Piaggio, a priest. In the late 1700s he built a wooden rack that pulled silken threads attached to the edge of the scrolls and could be adjusted with a simple mechanism to unfurl the document ever so gently, at a rate of 1 inch per day. Improbably, it sort of worked; the contraption opened some scrolls, though it tended to damage them or outright tear them into pieces. In later centuries, teams organized by other European powers, including one assembled by Napoleon, pieced together torn bits of mostly illegible text here and there.

Today the villa remains mostly buried, unexcavated and off-limits even to the experts. Most of what’s been found there and proven legible has been attributed to Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and poet, leading historians to hope there’s a much bigger main library buried elsewhere on-site. A wealthy, educated man like Piso would have had the classics of the day along with more modern works of history, law and philosophy, the thinking goes. “I do believe there’s a much bigger library there,” says Richard Janko, a University of Michigan classical studies professor who’s spent painstaking hours assembling scroll fragments by hand, like a jigsaw puzzle. “I see no reason to think it should not still be there and preserved in the same way.” Even an ordinary citizen from that time could have collections of tens of thousands of scrolls, Janko says. Piso is known to have corresponded often with the Roman statesman Cicero, and the apostle Paul had passed through the region a couple of decades before Vesuvius erupted. There could be writings tied to his visit that comment on Jesus and Christianity. “We have about 800 scrolls from the villa today,” Janko says. “There could be thousands or tens of thousands more.”

In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”

Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”

By 2016 he and his students had managed to read the Ein Gedi scroll, a charred ancient Hebrew text, by programming their specialized software to detect changes in density between the burnt manuscript and the burnt ink layered onto it. The software made the letters light up against a darker background. Seales’ team had high hopes to apply this technique to the Herculaneum papyri, but those were written with a different, carbon-based ink that their imaging gear couldn’t illuminate in the same way.

Over the past few years, Seales has begun experimenting with AI. He and his team have scanned the scrolls with more powerful imaging machines, examined portions of the papyrus where ink was visible and trained algorithms on what those patterns looked like. The hope was that the AI would start picking up on details that the human eye missed and could apply what it learned to more obfuscated scroll chunks. This approach proved fruitful, though it remained a battle of inches. Seales’ technology uncovered bits and pieces of the scrolls, but they were mostly unreadable. He needed another breakthrough.

Friedman set up Google alerts for Seales and the papyri in 2020, while still early in his Rome obsession. After a year passed with no news, he started watching YouTube videos of Seales discussing the underlying challenges. Among other things, he needed money. By 2022, Friedman was convinced he could help. He invited Seales out to California for an event where Silicon Valley types get together and share big ideas. Seales gave a short presentation on the scrolls to the group, but no one bit. “I felt very, very guilty about this and embarrassed because he’d come out to California, and California had failed him,” Friedman says.

On a whim, Friedman proposed the idea of a contest to Seales. He said he’d put up some of his own money to fund it, and his investing partner Daniel Gross offered to match it.

Seales says he was mindful of the trade-offs. The Herculaneum papyri had turned into his life’s work, and he wanted to be the one to decode them. More than a few of his students had also poured time and energy into the project and planned to publish papers about their efforts. Now, suddenly, a couple of rich guys from Silicon Valley were barging into their territory and suggesting that internet randos could deliver the breakthroughs that had eluded the experts.

More than glory, though, Seales really just hoped the scrolls would be read, and he agreed to hear Friedman out and help design the AI contest. They kicked off the Vesuvius Challenge last year on the Ides of March. Friedman announced the contest on the platform we fondly remember as Twitter, and many of his tech friends agreed to pledge their money toward the effort while a cohort of budding papyrologists began to dig into the task at hand. After a couple of days, Friedman had amassed enough money to offer $1 million in prizes, along with some extra money to throw at some of the more time-intensive basics.

Friedman hired people online to gather the existing scroll imagery, catalog it and create software tools that made it easier to chop the scrolls into segments and to flatten the images out into something that was readable on a computer screen. After finding a handful of people who were particularly good at this, he made them full members of his scroll contest team, paying them $40 an hour. His hobby was turning into a lifestyle.

The initial splash of attention helped open new doors. Seales had lobbied Italian and British collectors for years to scan his first scrolls. Suddenly the Italians were now offering up two new scrolls for scanning to provide more AI training data. With Friedman’s backing, a team set to work building precision-fitting, 3D-printed cases to protect the new scrolls on their private jet flight from Italy to a particle accelerator in England. There they were scanned for three days straight at a cost of about $70,000.

Seeing the imaging process in action drives home both the magic and difficulty inherent in this quest. One of the scroll remnants placed in the scanner, for example, wasn’t much bigger than a fat finger. It was peppered by high-energy X-rays, much like a human going through a CT scan, except the resulting images were delivered in extremely high resolution. (For the real nerds: about 8 micrometers.) These images were virtually carved into a mass of tiny slices too numerous for a person to count. Along each slice, the scanner picked up infinitesimal changes in density and thickness. Software was then used to unroll and flatten out the slices, and the resulting images looked recognizably like sheets of papyrus, the writing on them hidden.

The files generated by this process are so large and difficult to deal with on a regular computer that Friedman couldn’t throw a whole scroll at most would-be contest winners. To be eligible for the $700,000 grand prize, contestants would have until the end of 2023 to read just four passages of at least 140 characters of contiguous text. Along the way, smaller prizes ranging from $1,000 to $100,000 would be awarded for various milestones, such as the first to read letters in a scroll or to build software tools capable of smoothing the image processing. With a nod to his open-source roots, Friedman insisted these prizes could be won only if the contestants agreed to show the world how they did it.

Luke Farritor was hooked from the start. Farritor—a bouncy 22-year-old Nebraskan undergraduate who often exclaims, “Oh, my goodness!”—heard Friedman describe the contest on a podcast in March. “I think there’s a 50% chance that someone will encounter this opportunity, get the data and get nerd-sniped by it, and we’ll solve it this year,” Friedman said on the show. Farritor thought, “That could be me.”

The early months were a slog of splotchy images. Then Casey Handmer, an Australian mathematician, physicist and polymath, scored a point for humankind by beating the computers to the first major breakthrough. Handmer took a few stabs at writing scroll-reading code, but he soon concluded he might have better luck if he just stared at the images for a really long time. Eventually he began to notice what he and the other contestants have come to call “crackle,” a faint pattern of cracks and lines on the page that resembles what you might see in the mud of a dried-out lakebed. To Handmer’s eyes, the crackle seemed to have the shape of Greek letters and the blobs and strokes that accompany handwritten ink. He says he believes it to be dried-out ink that’s lifted up from the surface of the page.

The crackle discovery led Handmer to try identifying clips of letters in one scroll image. In the spirit of the contest, he posted his findings to the Vesuvius Challenge’s Discord channel in June. At the time, Farritor was a summer intern at SpaceX. He was in the break room sipping a Diet Coke when he saw the post, and his initial disbelief didn’t last long. Over the next month he began hunting for crackle in the other image files: one letter here, another couple there. Most of the letters were invisible to the human eye, but 1% or 2% had the crackle. Armed with those few letters, he trained a model to recognize hidden ink, revealing a few more letters. Then Farritor added those letters to the model’s training data and ran it again and again and again. The model starts with something only a human can see—the crackle pattern—then learns to see ink we can’t.

Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.

In early August, Farritor received an opportunity to put his software to the test. He’d returned to Nebraska to finish out the summer and found himself at a house party with friends when a new, crackle-rich image popped up in the contest’s Discord channel. As the people around him danced and drank, Farritor hopped on his phone, connected remotely to his dorm computer, threw the image into his machine-learning system, then put his phone away. “An hour later, I drive all my drunk friends home, and then I’m walking out of the parking garage, and I take my phone out not expecting to see anything,” he says. “But when I open it up, there’s three Greek letters on the screen.”

Around 2 a.m., Farritor texted his mom and then Friedman and the other contestants about what he’d found, fighting back tears of joy. “That was the moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is actually going to work. We’re going to read the scrolls.’”

Soon enough, Farritor found 10 letters and won $40,000 for one of the contest’s progress prizes. The classicists reviewed his work and said he’d found the Greek word for “purple.”

Farritor continued to train his machine-learning model on crackle data and to post his progress on Discord and Twitter. The discoveries he and Handmer made also set off a new wave of enthusiasm among contestants, and some began to employ similar techniques. In the latter part of 2023, Farritor formed an alliance with two other contestants, Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger, in which they agreed to combine their technology and share any prize money.

In the end, the Vesuvius Challenge received 18 entries for its grand prize. Some submissions were ho-hum, but a handful showed that Friedman’s gamble had paid off. The scroll images that were once ambiguous blobs now had entire paragraphs of letters lighting up across them. The AI systems had brought the past to life. “It’s a situation that you practically never encounter as a classicist,” says Tobias Reinhardt, a professor of ancient philosophy and Latin literature at the University of Oxford. “You mostly look at texts that have been looked at by someone before. The idea that you are reading a text that was last unrolled on someone’s desk 1,900 years ago is unbelievable.”

A group of classicists reviewed all the entries and did, in fact, deem Farritor’s team the winners. They were able to stitch together more than a dozen columns of text with entire paragraphs all over their entry. Still translating, the scholars believe the text to be another work by Philodemus, one centered on the pleasures of music and food and their effects on the senses. “Peering at and beginning to transcribe the first reasonably legible scans of this brand-new ancient book was an extraordinarily emotional experience,” says Janko, one of the reviewers. While these passages aren’t particularly revelatory about ancient Rome, most classics scholars have their hopes for what might be next.

There’s a chance that the villa is tapped out—that there are no more libraries of thousands of scrolls waiting to be discovered—or that the rest have nothing mind-blowing to offer. Then again, there’s the chance they contain valuable lessons for the modern world.

That world, of course, includes Ercolano, the modern town of about 50,000 built on top of ancient Herculaneum. More than a few residents own property and buildings atop the villa site. “They would have to kick people out of Ercolano and destroy everything to uncover the ancient city,” says Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II.

Barring a mass relocation, Friedman is working to refine what he’s got. There’s plenty left to do; the first contest yielded about 5% of one scroll. A new set of contestants, he says, might be able to reach 85%. He also wants to fund the creation of more automated systems that can speed the processes of scanning and digital smoothing. He’s now one of the few living souls who’s roamed the villa tunnels, and he says he’s also contemplating buying scanners that can be placed right at the villa and used in parallel to scan tons of scrolls per day. “Even if there’s just one dialogue of Aristotle or a beautiful lost Homeric poem or a dispatch from a Roman general about this Jesus Christ guy who’s roaming around,” he says, “all you need is one of those for the whole thing to be more than worth it.”

[shatar-aethelwynn]

"The Vesuvius Challenge: Resurrecting a Library of Ancient Scrolls". Presentations by Kennth Lapatin, Frederica Nicolardi, Brent Seales, and Nat Friedman for The Getty Museum in March, 2024. The video is a little over 2 hours long and ends with a recognition of the runners up and grandprize winners of the Vesuvius Challenge.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

Scholars of antiquity believe they are on the brink of a new era of understanding after researchers armed with artificial intelligence read the hidden text of a charred scroll that was buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago.

Hundreds of papyrus scrolls held in the library of a luxury Roman villa in Herculaneum were burned to a crisp when the town was devastated by the intense blast of heat, ash and pumice that destroyed nearby Pompeii in AD79.

Excavations in the 18th century recovered more than 1,000 whole or partial scrolls from the mansion, thought to be owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law.

However, the black ink was unreadable on the carbonised papyri and the scrolls crumbled to pieces when researchers tried to open them.

The breakthrough in reading the ancient material came from the $1m Vesuvius Challenge, a contest launched in 2023 by Brent Seales, a computer scientist at the University of Kentucky, and Silicon Valley backers.

The competition offered prizes for extracting text from high-resolution CT scans of a scroll taken at Diamond, the UK’s national synchrotron facility in Oxfordshire.

On Monday, Nat Friedman, a US tech executive and founding sponsor of the challenge, announced that a team of three computer-savvy students, Youssef Nader in Germany, Luke Farritor in the US, and Julian Schilliger in Switzerland, had won the $700,000 (£554,000) grand prize after reading more than 2,000 Greek letters from the scroll.

Papyrologists who have studied the text recovered from the blackened scroll were stunned at the feat.

“This is a complete gamechanger,” said Robert Fowler, emeritus professor of Greek at Bristol University and chair of the Herculaneum Society.

“There are hundreds of these scrolls waiting to be read.”

Dr Federica Nicolardi, a papyrologist at the University of Naples Federico II, added:

“This is the start of a revolution in Herculaneum papyrology and in Greek philosophy in general. It is the only library to come to us from ancient Roman times.”

“We are moving into a new era,” said Seales, who led efforts to read the scrolls by virtually unwrapping the CT images and training AI algorithms to detect the presence of ink.

He now wants to build a portable CT scanner to image scrolls without moving them from their collections.

In October, Farritor won the challenge’s $40,000 “first letters” prize when he identified the ancient Greek word for “purple” in the scroll.

He teamed up with Nader in November, with Schilliger, who developed an algorithm to automatically unwrap CT images, joining them days before the contest deadline on 31 December.

Together, they read more than 2,000 letters of the scroll, giving scholars their first real insight into its contents.

“It’s been an incredibly rewarding journey,” said Youssef.

“The adrenaline rush is what kept us going. It was insane. It meant working 20-something hours a day. I didn’t know when one day ended and the next day started.”

“It probably is Philodemus,” Fowler said of the author.

“The style is very gnarly, typical of him, and the subject is up his alley.”

The scroll discusses sources of pleasure, touching on music and food – capers in particular – and whether the pleasure experienced from a combination of elements owes to the major or minor constituents, the abundant or the scare.

“In the case of food, we do not right away believe things that are scarce to be absolutely more pleasant than those which are abundant,” the author writes.

“I think he’s asking the question: what is the source of pleasure in a mix of things? Is it the dominant element, is it the scarce element, or is it the mix itself?” said Fowler.

The author ends with a parting shot against his philosophical adversaries for having “nothing to say about pleasure, either in general or particular."

Seales and his research team spent years developing algorithms to digitally unwrap the scrolls and detect the presence of ink from the changes it produced in the papyrus fibres.

He released the algorithms for contestants to build on in the challenge.

Friedman’s involvement proved valuable not only for attracting financial donors.

When Seales was meant to fly to the UK to have a scroll scanned, a storm blew in cancelling all commercial flights.

Worried they might lose their slot at the Diamond light source, Friedman hastily organised a private jet for the trip.

Beyond the hundreds of Herculaneum scrolls waiting to be read, many more may be buried at the villa, adding weight to arguments for fresh excavations.

"The same technology could be applied to papyrus wrapped around Egyptian mummies," Fowler said.

These could include everything from letters and property deeds to laundry lists and tax receipts, shining light on the lives of ordinary ancient Egyptians.

“There are crates of this stuff in the back rooms of museums,” Fowler said.

The challenge continues this year with the goal to read 85% of the scroll and lay the foundations for reading all of those already excavated.

Scientists need to fully automate the process of tracing the surface of the papyrus inside each scroll and improve ink detection on the most damaged parts.

“When we launched this less than a year ago, I honestly wasn’t sure it’d work,” said Friedman.

“You know, people say money can’t buy happiness, but they have no imagination. This has been pure joy. It’s magical what happened, it couldn’t have been scripted better."

Source: The Guardian

How the Herculaneum Papyri were carbonised in the Mount Vesuvius eruption – Video

5 February 2024

[ilciambellano]

Ma a leggere per primo una parola nei papiri non è stato né Seales né uno dei suoi più stretti collaboratori, bensì Luke Farritor, uno studente di informatica di 21 anni dell’Università del Nebraska.

Farritor è uno degli oltre 1.500 informatici e studenti di informatica che si sono appassionati ai rotoli di Ercolano e ai tentativi di leggerli grazie a Nat Friedman, informatico e azionista di molte aziende tecnologiche americane, che tra le altre cose è stato amministratore delegato di GitHub, popolare servizio di hosting per progetti software. Nel 2020, durante uno dei lockdown dovuti alla pandemia da coronavirus, Friedman si è appassionato alla storia dei papiri di Ercolano leggendo un saggio divulgativo sulla vita nell’Impero romano e poi leggendo online delle ricerche di Seales.

Due anni dopo Friedman ha contattato Seales proponendogli di aiutarlo ad accelerare le ricerche sui rotoli: insieme Friedman e Seales hanno ideato la Vesuvius Challenge, una sfida aperta a informatici di tutto il mondo per realizzare dei software che rendano davvero leggibili i dati ottenuti col sincrotrone, che sono tantissimi per via della loro raffinatezza, in tempi brevi.

Seales ha diffuso su questo sito tutti i dati della sua squadra e insieme a Friedman ha istituito dei premi progressivi per chiunque riesca a ottenere un progresso nel progetto. Farritor ad esempio ha vinto 40mila dollari (circa 38mila euro) per aver identificato la parola “porpora”. Ci è riuscito realizzando a sua volta un programma di machine learning che è in grado di riconoscere le tracce di inchiostro ed evidenziarle.

Forse è un po’ tardi per mettermi a studiare machine learning, mannaggia.

[vlacas12]

This is one for everyone interested in ancient history and Epicurean philosophy. I just learned about this myself today.

Nat Friedman of the Vesuvius Challenge announced that they had just awarded their grand prize for the digital unrolling of a Herculaneum papyrus, which is a HUGE deal in ancient history academics.

Background: nearly all of our classical texts - Greek and Roman literature - comes to us via preservation in the Middle Ages. It is a 'closed corpus' - finds of new texts are extremely rare. The last really historically significant one was Aristotle's Athenaion Politeia in 1891.

Herculaneum was a smallish Roman resort town near Pompeii on the Bay of Naples which was covered with volcanic ash in 79 AD when Vesuvius erupted (like Pompeii). Among the wealthy resort villas of Herculaneum was the Villa of the Papyri, a villa with a large private library focused mostly on philosophy. Some 1,800 scrolls there were carbonized but preserved by the inflow of volcanic ash and have been recovered (intact to wildly varying degrees).

The problem is, of course, the scrolls are both 1) still rolled up and 2) reduced to lumps of carbon, so how on earth do you read them? And that's what the Vesuvius Challenge was focused on: scanning the scrolls using a particle accelerator and then taking that data and digitally unrolling them to produce a readable text. We got our first few words last year, and this year already our first large chunk of text.

It now seems almost certain that over the years to come, we're going to get a steady flow of new fragments and texts out of these, the first large-scale infusion of new texts into the classical corpus since the Renaissance. There are 1,800 of these papyri, 340 are basically complete and another 900 have readable fragments.

Now a few papyri were physically unrolled and partially read earlier (we've had these things since the 1850s) and they were philosophical texts, mostly Epicurean and the first new block of text seems to confirm that the current scroll is ... more Epicurean philosophy. So we're probably in for a LOT of Epicurean philosophy, but even if all we get are philosophical authors the potential texts are incredible: more of Aristotle's Constitutions, missing Plato, and so on.

[sronti]

Nat Friedman Embraces AI to Translate the Herculaneum Papyri

Nagy-nagy menőség. A cím nem jó, nem a fordítás a kihívás, hanem az olvasás. Ezek ugyanis nagyjából szénné égett tekercsek, amikből még az is lehet, hogy végül évezredek-évszázadok óta elveszett írásokat lehet megmenteni és újra elolvasni.

(nagyon hosszú cikk, de megéri)

[sarkos]

After weeks of local speculation, the purchasers of 55,000 acres of northern California land have been revealed. The group Flannery Associates – backed by a cohort of Silicon Valley investors – has quietly purchased $800m worth of agricultural and empty land, the New York Times has reported. Their goal is to build a utopian new town that will offer its thousands of residents reliable public transportation and urban living, all of which would operate using clean energy. The project was spearheaded by Jan Sramek, a 36-year-old former trader for the investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, and is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors including Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist; Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of Linkedin; Laurene Powell Jobs, the founder of the philanthropic group Emerson Collective and wife of Steve Jobs; Marc Andreessen, an investor and software developer; Patrick and John Collison, the sibling co-founders of the payment processor Stripe; and the entrepreneurs Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, the Times reported. Though Flannery has been purchasing farmland and empty plots over the past five years it has only recently started interacting with local officials and residents, according to the Times and local reports. Flannery has purchased land from farmers for several times more than the market value and become the biggest landowners in Solano county, an area 60 miles north-west of San Francisco. The land bought by the firm encircles Travis air force base in Fairfield, a city of about 120,000 residents and home to the Anheuser-Busch Co brewery and the Jelly Belly jelly bean factory.

Silicon Valley elites revealed as buyers of $800m of land to build utopian city | California | The Guardian

[dempameat]

XユーザーのGareth Harneyさん: 「A tidal wave of new primary sources from the ancient world could very soon be on its way - enough to keep scholars busy for decades! The first words have being read from digitally ‘unrolled’ carbonised scrolls from a Roman library in Herculaneum! (Image: Nat Friedman) https://t.co/OvMuyIjos4」 / Twitter

[are-they-z]

Supporters of Creative Community For Peace Open Letter (Support of Israel) - Part 2/2

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Cindy Bond, Founder/CEO, Mission Pictures International

Jacob Abrams, Executive Director, Abrams Theatre Project

Iris Helfand, Retired, Theatrical Wardrobe Union 764 NYC

Golan Ramraz, Writer/Producer, EGX Film Factory

Eric Schrier, President, Disney Television Studios

Scott Pollack, President, A to Z Media

Matthew Tishler, Songwriter/Producer

William Schmidt, Writer/Producer, Edelson Productiobs

Bruce Cohen, Producer, Bold Choices Productions

Roslyn Cohn, Actress

Greg Goetzman, CEO, Goetzman Group

Alex Astrachan, Director of Development, Permut Presentations

David Permut, President, Permut Presentations

Jill Littman, Partner, Impression Entertainment

Ari Luxenberg, Senior Vice President, Business Affairs, Paramount Television Studios

Joshua Rothstein, CEO/Founder, Ice Cream For Dinner

Kevin Lin, Co-Founder, Twitch

Stacy Harris, Publisher/Executive Editor, Stacy’s Music Row Report

Mark Rogers, Musician, abovewaters indy

Nizar Aghri, Writer

Timotius Samanuli, Director, EMOS Global Digital

Virtic Emil Brown, Filmmaker, Artist Studio Prods.

Tim Clemente, Writer/Producer, XG Productions

Jay Karas, Director

Laurence Miller, Producer, Nimax Theatres

Birgit Grebenstein, Sound Technician

Mitchell James Kaplan, Author

Sheila Richey, TV/Film Producer, George Richey Family Music

Gero Worstbrock, Head of Legal & Business Affairs, Constantin Film

Vered Danovitch, Actor, LAV

Richard Motzkin, EVP & Managing Executive, Global Soccer, Wasserman

Matt Greenberg, Managing Partner, Greenberg Chopurian-Valencia & Associates, LLP

Neil Silvert, President and Owner, Your Grey Matters Podcast

John Benjamin David Tatum, Actor/Producer/Director

Matthew Mishory, Director

Iyar Hartogs, Influencer Manager

Dan Bleiwas, Former Major League Baseball Scout

Lisa Cohen, President, Associated Booking Corp.

Sabrina Nudeliman Wagon, CEO, ELO Studios

Peter Tordai, Chief Creative Officer, White Dog

Al Rain, Songwriter/Producer

Tahj Mowry, Actor

Val Stulman, Writer/Actor/Educator

Jonathan Kier, Co-Founder, Upgrade Productions

Gary Gilbert, Producer, Gilbert Films

Jennifer Joel, Co-Head, CAA Books, CAA

Larry Klein, Record Producer/Musician, Strange Cargo Inc

Alan Zweibel, TV Writer/Screenwriter/Playwright/Author

Patrick Schabus, Publishing Director, The Friendly Facts

Seth Faber, SVP Artist & Label Strategy, Stem Distribution

Sylvanna Seydel, Actress/Costumer, Made With Mischief

Yehuda Siegal, Actor

Betty Jo Butler, Talent Agent and Producer, Resilient Films Studios

Daniel Finkelman, Producer/Director, Danielfinkelmanfilms.com

Michael Drebert, Creative Director, Resilient Films Studios

Joseph Browns, Film Set Designer

Zach Calig, Writer/Producer

Greg Hoffman, Actor

Hallie Brookman, Agent, UTA

Victoria Cook, Partner, Frankfurt Kurnit

Ed Buller, Composer/Producer/Musician, who’ll ever have me

Freddie Green, Writer/Director

Andrea Jolly, Actor

Simon Halfon, Producer, Nemperor Ltd

Steve Luna, Actor/Filmmaker

Ricky Kirshner, Producer, Kirshner Events

Jacob Schiff, Agent, CAA

Gerald Petievich, Writer, Charles Carr Productions Inc

Allegra Israel, Games Producer

Allyson Taylor, Actress, Aqua Talent

Don Swayze, Actor

Josh Roehl, Singer/Songwriter

Patricia Randell, Actor

Bill McCarty, Comedian/Actor

Judy Friedman, General Counsel, PhilmCo Media

Dmitry Borshch, Artist

Michal Shany, Entertainment Attorney

David Blackman, EVP, Head of Film &TV Development and Production, Universal Music Group

Declan Joyce, Actor/Writer/Producer, Irish Magic Inc.

Kellie Adan, Spiritual Director/Writer

Michele Robins, Artist

Michael Black, Singer/Songwriter/Artist

Alan Bradley, Author/Songwriter

Richard Klagsbrun, Writer/Composer

Michael Porter, Director, Netflix

Stanley Herman, Actor/Writer/Music Publisher, Jordan/Herman/Holmes

Jon Keidan, Trustee, George Gershwin Godowsky Trust

Adam Gershwin, Manager, Marc George Gershwin LLC

LJ Strunsky, Managing Director, The Ira Gershwin Music Estate

Nataliya Kirakozova, Film Director, Founder, Dva Kapitana

Misha Aranyshev, Editor, Dva Kapitana

Dan Liebman, Actor

Ross Buckley, Senior Business Development Manager, Prime Video

Brett Rosen, Motion Picture Agent, Endeavor

Beth Suckiel, Artist, East Linden Avenue

Iris Joon, Artist, Blair Records & Publishing

Marshall Blair-Cohn, Musician/Composer/CEO, Blair Records & Publishing

Peter Samuelson, CEO, PhilmCo Media LLC

Gerry Tamber, Lead Singer/Mandolin, The Shade Tree Pickers Bluegrass Band

Seth Oster, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, The Wonderful Company

Michael Pasternak, Actor, Founder, The Amazing Bottle Dancers

David Kantrowitz, Musician

Sam Schifrien, Founder/Content Development & Production, 93 Cedar

Cathryn Wadden, Costumer

Jan Kunesh, Exec Director, Production Finance, 20th Television

Robert Avrech, Screenwriter

Sharon Lieblein, Casting Director, Sharon Lieblein Casting

Orly Sitowitz, Casting Director

Bob Kushell, Writer/Producer

Jeffrey Bank, CEO, Alicart Group LLC

Nancy Klopper, Casting Director

Larry Jenkins, Manager, LJ Entertainment

Stacey Pianko, Casting Director, Stacey Pianko Casting

Susan Paley Abramson, Casting Director, Paley Hempe Casting

Lindsay Heiman, Showrunner’s Assistant, Warner Bros.

Wendy Warren, Writer

Tim Blough, Actor

Cathy Sandrich Gelfond, Casting Director, Mackey/Sandrich Casting

Josh Lieberman, Agent, Creative Artists Agency

Mark Silverman, President & COO, Fox Sports

Danielle Cohen, Global Operations and Distribution Executive

Heidi Kozak Haddad, Writer/Actress/Producer

Steven Adelson, Director/Producer, Breakout Pictures Inc

Michelle Hansen Como, Story Developer

Justin Kalifowitz, Founder & Chairman, Downtown Music Holdings

Sherrill Hayes, Writer

Andrew Bergman, CEO, Downtown Music Holdings

Peter Lewit, Managing Partner, Davis Shapiro Lewit & Grabel, LLP

Binta Niambi Brown, Talent Manager, Omalilly Projects

Andrew Howard, Personal Manager, Shelter Entertainment Group

Brenda Kyle, Television Executive

Chris Hartung, Musician

Aidan J. Crowley, Actor/Producer

JoAnne Ruggeri, Arts Administrator

Rona Menashe, Co-CEO and Co-President, Guttman Associate

Lizzie Friedman, Producer/Partner, Priority Pictures

Michael Rauch, Showrunner

Yael Bergman, Producer/Writer, YB Productions

Marissa Nadel, SVP, Integrated Marketing, Paramount

Paul Simpson, Actor

Alan Gary, Actor/Writer, Too Much Fun Productions, Inc.

Eric Gault, Musician

Noah Morris, Writer/Producer/Actor, At Liberty Entertainment Studios

Steve Vitolo, CEO, Scriptation

Noel Ashman, Film Producer/Director

Brian Ash, Writer/Producer

Keith J. Klein, Media Director

William Jeffcock, Director

Jennifer Peralta-Ajemian, Founder/Casting Director, JPA Casting

Ari Roussimoff, Director/Artist

Garry Schyman, Composer, Garry Schyman Productions

Carol Berke, Color Designer, Walt Disney Company

Ari Lubet, Manager, 3 Arts Entertainment

Samantha Korn, Talent Agent, WME

Shari Shankewitz, Partner, WME

Daniel Rak, Agent, WME

Gabriella Shink, Talent Agent, WME

Anna Anna, Agent, WME

Rachel Goldberg, Director

Hilary Michael, Agent, Partner & Co-Head of Literary Packaging, WME

Max Maulitz, Agent, WME

Nicole Rosen, Producer, Ladybug Productions

Agnieszka Kolek, Artist

Jeremy Drysdale, Screenwriter

Samantha Leon, Talent Agent, WME

Alyssa Reuben, Agent, WME

Jeffrey Schnabolk, Senior Manager, IMG Models

Caroline Gold, Writer

Natalie Haverstock, Artist, Miss Ballooniverse Ltd

Mina Kupfermann, Artist

Alan Chebot, Director/Executive Producer, Parallax Productions, Inc.

Wade Brown, Writer

Anna-Sue Greenberg, Producer, Facet4 Media

Sheri Kelton, Manager, SRK Entertainment

Euphrosene Labon, Writer, Wise El Co

Abraham Hoschander, Attorney and Radio Talk Show Host

Nancy Josephson, Partner, WME

Nathan Ross, Film/TV Producer, Lilyrose Productions Inc.

Howard Klein, Partner, 3 Arts Entertainment

Amir Shahkhalili, Agent, WME

Andrea Cayton, Philanthropist

David Boren, Partner, Ritholz Levy Fields LLP

Marc Emert-Hutner, Vice-President, Membership, Pop/Rock, ASCAP

Sara Laffer, Executive, WME

Orna Rachovitsky, Actress/Producer/Filmmaker, Goldart Films

Orestes Matacena, Actor/Producer/Writer/Director, Goldart Films

David Herman, Documentary Director, Double Shot Films

Kos OmIsrael, CEO, Kos Entertainment

Dolores Delaney, Writer

Rhonda Gale, Business Affairs Consultant

Kirk Acevedo, Actor

Talin Chaturantabut, Actor

John Winfield, President and Chairman, InterGroup Corp.

Neil Blair, Founding Partner, The Blair Partnership

Marilyn Lindsay, Production Accountant

Amanda Alley, Creative Executive, Skydance Media

Jim Jackoway, Attorney, Jackoway Austen Tyerman Wertheimer Mandelbaum Morris Bernstein Trattner & Klein

Ben Jacobs, Writer

Steven Keslowitz, Attorney and Author

Aaron Wilson, Writer/Artist

Richard Cannon, Photographer

Nina Mueller, Translator & Actor, COMM-art

Leo Pearlman, Managing Partner, Fulwell 73

Nicholas Frenkel, Partner, 3 Arts Entertainment

Rebecca Wicking, Actor/Singer

Mark Mason, Playwright

Keith Lucas, Filmmaker, LBMC

Joanne Horowitz, CEO, Joanne Horowitz Management

Rod Lurie, Film Writer/Director, Perfection Hunter Productions

Raquel Munoz, Production Executive

Scott Baker, CEO/Founder, RiverArch Ventures LLC

Alexander Ney, Artist

Joel Ney, Independent Creative

Frank Eckhardt, Artist

Noah Munro Lehrman, Musician/Writer

Bar Maman, Artist, Art by Bar

Jamie Conviser, Music Producer, The Walt Disney Company

Roland Ronge, Photographer/Artist

Dvora Englefield, Partner/Head of Music Artist Strategy, WME

Brian Ross, Writer/Producer

David Sacks, Executive Producer

Hannah Lowy, Writer/Director

Bernd Schuller, Artist & Scientist

Will Daws, Creative Director, Plum Pictures

Rinne B. Groff, Playwright/Performer

Lori Silfen, Head of MGM Music, MGM/Amazon Studios

Jacob Elyachar, Chief Content Producer-Writer/Podcast Host

Michelle Jubelirer, Chair & CEO, Capitol Music Group

Andrew Heinze, Playwright, New York City, American Renaissance Theater Company

Adam Butterfield, Producer/Actor

Lisa Mierke, Manager, Mosaic

Bruce Kirschbaum, Writer/Producer

Chaim and Stephanie Glicken, Co-Founders, Digilicious Media LLC

Julia Rymer Brucker, Artist/Art Educator

Lloyd Braun, Producer

Sarah Agor, Actress/Producer

Nathan Ross, Producer

Jonnie Forster, Founder, The Penthouse

Sarah Ulicny, Writer

Holly Hubsher, SVP, Bay Mills Studios

Michael Rubinoff, Theatre Producer

Bruna Papandrea, Founder/Producer, Made Up Stories

Mitchell Akselrad, Writer/Producer

Liran Nathan, Actor

Fred Raskin, Film Editor

Sasha Valenti, Artist

David Friendly, Film/TV Producer, Friendly Films

Allison Eden, Glass Mosaic Artist

Sasha Valenti, Artist

Rachel Morrissey, Artist

Lisa Edelstein, Actress/Artist

Harel Sharon, Editor In Chief, CON-ART magazine

Wyatt Benny, Songwriter/Filmmaker, 327 Films

David Hedges, Writer

Seth Saltzman, Musician/Music Professional

Zoe Manor, Designer/Producer

Emily Leonard, Music Talent Publicity Assistant, The Lede Company

Victor Fresco, Writer/Executive Producer

Adam Shulman, Manager/Producer, Anonymous Content

Sarah Flack, Film Editor

Steve Sackstein, Background Actor

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[govindhtech]

EvolutionaryScale makes ESM3 Gen AI Protein Design Model

EvolutionaryScale

A startup with support from NVIDIA and others presents the NVIDIA H100-enabled model for studying new proteins. Prompt-based code creation by generative AI has transformed software development; protein design is the next.

The third-generation ESM model, called ESM3, was released today by EvolutionaryScale. It provides protein discovery engineers with a programmable platform by reasoning over the sequence, structure, and functions of proteins simultaneously.

The business, which sprang out of the Meta Fair (Fundamental AI Research) team, has received money from NVIDIA and Amazon in addition to Lux Capital, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross.

EvolutionaryScale, at the vanguard of programmable biology, can help scientists build proteins that target cancer cells, discover safer plastic substitutes, promote environmental mitigation, and more.

NVIDIA H100 Tensor GPU

With the development of the scale-out model of ESM3, EvolutionaryScale is leading the way in programmable biology. This model leverages NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs to provide the highest computational capacity ever included in a biological foundation model. Compared to the ESM2 model, which included 98 billion parameters, the ESM3 model requires about 25 times more flops and 60 times more data.

The company offers technology that can give drug discovery researchers hints about how diseases can be cured, drugs developed, and, as its name suggests, how humans have evolved at scale as a species. The company created a database of over 2 billion protein sequences to train its AI model.

Using ESM3 to Quicken In Silico Biological Research

EvolutionaryScale intends to accelerate protein discovery with ESM3 by leveraging large improvements in training data.

With the help of around 2.8 billion protein sequences taken from various organisms and biomes, scientists were able to train the model to recognize and certify novel proteins with ever-increasing accuracy.

ESM3 provides a lot of improvements over earlier iterations. Because the model is “all to all” and naturally generative, structure and function annotations can be supplied as input in addition to output.

Scientists can refine this base model to create custom models based on their own proprietary data once it is made publicly available. A time-traveling device for in silico biological research is made possible by the increase in protein engineering capabilities brought forth by ESM3’s large-scale generative training across massive volumes of data.

NVIDIA BioNeMo

Creating the Next Major Advancements The generative AI boost that NVIDIA BioNeMo ESM-3 offers to biologists and protein designers enhances their engineering and comprehension of proteins. It can create new proteins using a framework that is provided, self-improve its protein design based on input, and design proteins depending on the functionality that the user specifies with only a few basic prompts.

Users can iterate back and forth using these capabilities in tandem or in any combination to provide chain-of-thought protein design. It is as if the user were messaging a researcher who had learned the language fluently and had memorized the complex three-dimensional meaning of every protein sequence known to humans.

According to Tom Sercu, vice president of engineering at EvolutionaryScale and co-founder, “They’ve been impressed by the ability of ESM3 to creatively respond to a variety of complex prompts in its internal testing.” A new green fluorescent protein was created by tackling a difficult protein design problem. They anticipate that ESM3 will help scientists work more quickly and create new opportunities; they’re interested to see how it will impact life sciences research in the future.

NVIDIA H100

Today, EvolutionaryScale will launch a closed beta for its API, and code and weights for a limited open version of ESM3 are freely accessible for non-commercial purposes. NVIDIA BioNeMo, a generative AI drug discovery platform, will shortly get this version. Select customers will soon have access to the whole ESM3 family of models as an NVIDIA NIM microservice, which has been run-time optimized in partnership with NVIDIA and is backed by an NVIDIA AI Enterprise software licence that can be tested at ai.nvidia.com.

These models require significantly more processing power to train. The Andromeda cluster, which makes use of NVIDIA H100 GPUs and NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand networking, was used to train ESM3.

The ESM3 model will be accessible on a few partner platforms, such as NVIDIA BioNeMo, Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Sagemaker, and AWS HealthOMICs.

ESM3 Futures

A large-scale language model created specifically for protein sequences is called ESM3 (Evolutionary Scale Modelling version 3). Some of its highlights:

High Predictability of Protein Properties: ESM3 accurately predicts protein structure, function, and evolutionary relationships.

Large-Scale Training: Thanks to training on an enormous protein sequence dataset, it is able to comprehend and produce extremely accurate protein-related data.

Transfer Learning: ESM3 has excellent versatility and adaptability to various protein analysis tasks, as it can be tailored for particular protein prediction tasks.

Efficient Model Architecture: To provide efficient processing and prediction, the model architecture is tailored to handle the length and complexity of protein sequences.

Drug Discovery Applications: ESM3 is a useful tool in drug development because of its precision in predicting protein structures and activities.

Integration with Bioinformatics Tools: Its usefulness in a range of scientific and medical applications can be increased by integrating it with current bioinformatics pipelines and tools.

Interpretable Predictions: By offering outcomes that can be easily understood, the model enables researchers to make well-informed judgements in their research by comprehending the foundation of its predictions.

Evolutionary links between proteins can be analyzed using ESM3, which provides support for the research of protein evolution and the discovery of conserved areas. Because of these characteristics, ESM3 is an effective instrument for promoting protein studies and their uses in biotechnology and medicine.

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