A video featuring Luke Farritor — one of the men comprising the six-member leadership team in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — resurfaced this week, courtesy of the 23-year-old’s growing legion of fans and admirers.
The 2023 video featured Farritor explaining how he used artificial intelligence to decipher a fragment of a 2,000-year-old Roman scroll that was decimated when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, annihilating the city of Pompeii.
“I’ve always been interested in history,” Farritor said in the video. “Growing up, I learned Latin. I was never that good at it, but I was always kind of in to that sort of stuff. [I] read a lot about the Roman Empire and that sort of thing.”
Related: 19-Year-Old Edward Coristine is Quickly Becoming the DOGE Leader Most Feared by Federal Employees
At the start of the chllanege, we had not been able to find any writing at all within these scrolls. There are hundreds of these scrolls that are from the mansion. We had scanned a couple of them, and no one had been able to find any writing.”
Farritor added:
Late one Saturday night, I was sitting at a party at a friend’s house in Omaha, and I got a text from another person on the challenge team and he says, ‘Hey, I’ve just uploaded this new kind of piece of the scroll. You should take a look at it. I remotely access my computer. I type into it like, ‘Please run the algorithm on this new piece of scroll.’ And then I just kind of start it. I pull out my phone again just nonchalantly like, ‘Hey, I wonder how that went.’ And there are three Greek letters on the screen — letters I’d never seen before.
It was really cool, because it’s like, Oh my goodness, like we actually detected new writing in the scrolls using AI. And that was the moment I realized, like, this is actually going to work. Like, we were probably going to read the scrolls. And I completely freaked out. My friends were there and I was cheering, jumping up and down, you know, screaming, crying all the stuff. I, you know, took a picture of the results and I sent them to my mom. She called me and she’s like, “Hey, these look great!” You know? It was a really special moment.
His team won a $750,000 price for being the first to decipher a fragment of the scroll. It was just one of around 1,000 Herculaneum Papyri scrolls discovered in a library near Mt. Vesuvius in the 1700s. The scrolls turn to ash at the touch of by human hands.
Farritor said he first heard of challenge from a podcast as he was driving to his SpaceX internship in Texas.
You can watch the full video of his comments above.