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by abhishekjha 165 days ago
Oh I have really been thinking long about this. The intelligence that we have in these models represent a time.

Now if I train a foundation models with docs from library of Alexandria and only those texts of that period, I would have a chance to get a rudimentary insight on what the world was like at that time.

And maybe time shift further more.

1 comments

> I would have a chance to get a rudimentary insight on what the world was like at that time

Congratulations, you've reinvented the history book (just with more energy consumption and less guarantee of accuracy)

History books, especially those from classical antiquity, are notoriously not guaranteed to be accurate either.
Do you expect something exclusively trained on them to be any better?
To a large extent, yes. A model trained on many different accounts of an event is likely going to give a more faithful picture of that event than any one author.

This isn't super relevant to us because very few histories from this era survived, but presumably there was sufficient material in the Library of Alexandria to cover events from multiple angles and "zero out" the different personal/political/religious biases coloring the individual accounts.