Elon Musk Says He’ll Help Fund AI Effort to Read Roman Scrolls

Elon Musk will provide financial support to a project using artificial intelligence to digitally unfurl ancient scrolls that’d been unreadable for centuries.

Bloomberg Businessweek reported this week on a breakthrough in the project, which is known as the Vesuvius Challenge and run by Nat Friedman, the former chief executive officer of GitHub. A group of contestants successfully took scans of scrolls from the Roman town of Herculaneum, which had been charred by the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii, and used AI to read entire paragraphs from them.

The Musk Foundation, the billionaire’s charitable arm, will offer the funding, Musk wrote in a post ...