A New Chatbot Wants to Unlock the Secrets in Tattered Ancient Greek Records

Researchers have developed Apollo, the world’s first advanced large language model for Ancient Greek, to accelerate the restoration of damaged papyrus fragments. Trained on approximately 600 million historical Greek words, Apollo assists scholars by proposing word options to fill in missing gaps, ensuring human expertise remains central to the process. This initiative, a collaboration between the Austrian Academy of Science, Mistral, and Sail Reply, aims to restore ancient documents without polluting the historical record with AI-generated errors.

This report details the world's first advanced large language model specifically for Ancient Greek, unlike general-purpose models that lack specialized historical linguistic training.