Historian uses GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 to crack John Dee's ciphers, urges lab funding
emollick · x · 2026-09-25
- Historian Benjamin Breen argues AI labs should fund historical research, showing GPT-6 Sol and Opus 5.5 doing more than transcription: making progress on John Dee's ciphers and tracing the alchemical ideas Darwin drew from.
- He lays out when frontier models gain traction in the humanities: problems experts have identified, fully digitized data, fit with multilingual/math/autonomous-research strengths, custom code solutions, and—crucially—clearly provable or falsifiable answers.
- That last factor, he argues, explains why reasoning models rampaged through mathematics but not the humanities, and he calls for labs, scholars, and funders to pursue these collaborations.
Related event: Historian Uses GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 to Crack Centuries-Old Ciphers(2 posts)→
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