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Could modern computers decipher hieroglyphics if we never found the Rosetta Stone? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by saywhatisabigw@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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What if we never found the Rosetta Stone and could not read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Could computers or AI decipher them today?

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[–] negativenull@lemm.ee 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Don't confuse modern LLM models (like ChatGPT) with AI. As the saying goes:

All Buicks are Cars, but not all Cars are Buicks

LLMs are a form of AI, but there is a lot more going on in the world of AI than just LLMs.

[–] Lemmylefty@lemmy.world 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That’s a good point, and you’re right that I’m conflating them.

What other elements of AI would you imagine would be useful here?

[–] negativenull@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

You'd have to ask people who work in the AI field, and, alas, I'm not one of those people.

There has been a lot of language work on attempting to reconstruct the original Indo-European Language, using combinations of pattern recognition and statistical analysis of child languages. Those sorts of tools could aid in deciphering a dead written language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

However, another written language called Linear-A (of the ancient Minoans) has yet to be deciphered, despite lots of attempts at trying.
https://www.thoughtco.com/linear-writing-system-of-the-minoans-171553

So:
¯\(ツ)/¯

[–] turkalino@lemmy.yachts 6 points 1 year ago

to expand your point, the sole job of an LLM is to, when given a sequence of words (e.g. half a sentence), predict what the next several words should be. the model has no concept of what English words mean, so instead it makes this prediction based on statistics that were derived from basically reading through hundreds of thousands of English sentences

TL;DR LLMs don’t understand languages, they’ve just memorized statistics about them