Ancient Greek papyrus restoration gets its own LLM

The Austrian Academy of Sciences will release Apollo on Wednesday, a large language model built specifically for Ancient Greek, developed with Mistral and Sail Reply and free for academics through a chatbot interface.

The model was trained on roughly 600 million Ancient Greek words drawn from manuscripts, papyri and inscriptions, and switches register with context: Homeric Greek for Homer, Doric dialect for Doric inscriptions.

The project team says it will speed up restoring damaged papyri, but scholars caution it will not produce lost Sophocles plays, since most unrestored papyri are mundane documents; Apollo only proposes candidate words, and the scholar still chooses.