On 28 May 2026, the »AI Now Summit« took place in Paris. The event was organised by Mistral AI – a software company regarded as Europe’s leading response to US giants such as OpenAI and Google. Our colleague, the Roman historian and papyrologist Anna Dolganov, and Hubertus Schmid-Schmidsfelden, Director of Institutes and Infrastructure at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), attended the event and presented the OeAW’s activities in the field of artificial intelligence in science and research.
In her keynote speech, Anna Dolganov presented her innovative project »Decoding Antiquity«, which, in collaboration with leading AI developers Mistral AI and SAIL Reply, aims to develop large language models (LLMs) for ancient languages, as well as LLM-powered vision-language models. The aim is to advance the decipherment of ancient documents. As a first step, Apollo, the world’s first LLM for Ancient Greek, was developed. The next step is a vision-language model to transcribe vast quantities of unread Greek papyri, of which the Austrian National Library holds one of the world’s largest collections. There are also plans to develop advanced AI systems for Latin and other ancient languages.
The AI Summit, which brought together AI developers and representatives of private and public organisations in the fields of financial services, the automotive industry, energy, manufacturing, defence, the public sector and more, provided an ideal platform to present the interface between archaeology/classical studies and AI to an international audience. Dolganov’s presentation was enthusiastically received and sparked promising discussions about potential synergies and opportunities for cooperation between academia and industry.
