Austrian Academy of Sciences Releases Apollo, a Large Language Model for Ancient Greek

The Austrian Academy of Sciences, together with French AI lab Mistral and tech service company Sail Reply, has released Apollo, the world's first advanced large language model for Ancient Greek. It was trained on manuscripts, papyrus, and stone inscriptions, covering about 600 million ancient Greek historical words.

Researchers can use Apollo for free through a chatbot interface. It helps scholars quickly sort through papyrus fragments and find new research angles. For damaged texts, the model uses statistical probability to suggest the most likely words to fill gaps, and can automatically switch dialects, such as using Homeric Greek when it recognizes Homeric texts.

Oxford professor Armand D'Angour said that if the machine can suggest candidate words for gaps, it would greatly speed up research. The team says the technology could later be adapted to other ancient languages like Latin and Ancient Egyptian.