Vesuvius Challenge
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This story is about Nat Friedman's Vesuvius Challenge, a competition to decipher ancient scrolls using AI and machine learning.
Nat Friedman, an interesting guy to follow who's doing a lot with AI investing right now, created this prize. It's called the Vesuvius Challenge. Basically, when Mount Vesuvius exploded, it ruined a bunch of ancient Greek texts. Friedman is offering a prize to anyone who can create an algorithm using machine learning to help decipher parts of these damaged texts.
Recently, there was a breakthrough in the challenge. Someone figured out how to read a bit of the scroll using a simple computer vision technique. They were able to take 4 passages with 140 characters each and get 85% of the characters readable or recoverable.
Elon Musk, through his foundation, donated $2 million to this challenge, while Friedman and Daniel Gross put up $25,000. The goal is to unroll and read these ancient scrolls, potentially uncovering important historical texts that have been lost for centuries.
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.