Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters

(resobscura.substack.com)

34 points | by benbreen 2 hours ago

5 comments

  • loufe 14 minutes ago
    I've been using AI to help with my genealogical research, and it's been fantastic. I am loving pushing the family history back and catching mistakes that someone who many others share as a common ancestor have made.
    • aleksiy123 10 minutes ago
      I also have been doing this every round of models releasing.

      Thanks for reminding me to try this new round of models.

      I wonder if there are some good tools/apis that can help here.

      A lot of information is often login gated

  • riazrizvi 1 hour ago
    This is a strong application of LLMs IMO. They are idea machines. Historical ways of thinking give us different paths to explore the world through.
  • z_rho_one 45 minutes ago
    Great use case of AI. Almost 4 years after the sensational release of GPT3.5, the best use case of AI is still being a powerful search engine that can gather information from all corners of the digital world.
    • monomania 22 minutes ago
      This. They still make a lot of mistakes, but their working memory and processing of a massive corpus of data are obviously beyond what any human could ever do. But when they flag something interesting for expert review you can do some really good stuff with it.

      Slightly tangential: I found that when using an LLM to transform data, it inevitably hallucinated data and corrupted it. The solution I found was to isolate the data from the transformation process: basically, have it create an output template which you can verify, and a python program to manipulate data into the template. Taking this approach has saved me a lot of time and money.

  • whythismatters 52 minutes ago
    Great post, thank you! So, let's resolve ancient Near East chronology and determine an absolute date for the sack of Babylon?
  • b112 54 minutes ago
    I'm guessing it wasn't Claude 5.5, not with the "dangerous" nature of this work.