Nat Friedman (Github CEO) — Reading ancient scrolls, open source, & AI

... we have 600 plus kind of roughly intact scrolls that we can open. And I heard, I heard about this and I thought that was incredibly exciting, like the idea that there is information from 2,000 years in the past, we don't know what's in these things. If we could read all of them, then that would give us approximately a doubling of the total texts that we have from antiquity. If there are thousands more papyrus scrolls in there and we, and we now have the techniques to read them, then there's gold in that mud, and you know, it's gotta be dug out. I just fundamentally don't believe the world is efficient and so if I see an opportunity to do something, I used to but I no longer have a reflexive reaction that says, "Oh, that must not be a good idea. If it were a good idea, someone would already be doing it."

Okay. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Nat Friedman, who was the CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2021. Before that he started and sold two companies, uh, companies, Simeon and Xamarin, and he is also the founder of AI Grant and California Yimby. And most recently he is the organizer and funder of the Scroll Prize, which is where we'll start this conversation. So Nat, do you wanna tell the audience about what the Scroll Prize is?

Well, we're, we're calling it the Vesuvius Challenge.

Oh, okay. Got it.

And, uh, this is just this crazy and exciting thing I feel like incredibly honored to have gotten caught up in, but, uh, a couple of years ago, I was reading... It was in the midst of COVID and, uh, I think we were in lockdown and like everybody else, we were falling into internet rabbit holes, and I just started reading about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy about 2,000 years ago. And it turns out that when Vesuvius erupted, uh, it was AD 79, it destroyed all the nearby towns. Everyone knows about Pompeii, but there was another nearby town called Herculaneum and Herculaneum was sort of like the Beverly Hills to Pompeii, so big villas, big houses, fancy people. And in Herculaneum there was one villa in particular, it was enormous, and it had once been owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and so well-connected guy. And it was full of beautiful statues and marbles and art but it was also the home to a huge library of papyrus scrolls, and so when the villa was buried, the, the volcano actually, it spit out enormous quantities of mud and ash and it buried Herculaneum, in particular, in something like 20 meters of material. So it wasn't like a thin layer, it was a very thick layer. Those towns were buried and forgotten for hundreds of years. No one even knew exactly where they were until the 1700s, and so in 1750, a farm worker who was digging a well kind of in the outskirts of Herculaneum struck this marble paving stone of a path that had been at this huge villa, and of course he, he was pretty far down when he did that, he was, you know, 60 feet down, and then subsequently this Swiss engineer came in and started digging tunnels from that well shaft and they found all these treasures, and, and that was sort of the spirit at the time, was like looting.