Nat Versus the Volcano: Can an AI Investor Solve an Ancient Mystery from the Ashes of Vesuvius?

Long before men’s daily thoughts about ancient Rome became a TikTok meme, former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman’s mind was regularly turning toward the Roman Empire.

In the early pandemic months of 2020, he ripped through Philip Matyszak’s “24 Hours in Ancient Rome,” a book that, by his own admission, was “written for eighth graders.” Friedman went down a Roman rabbit hole, diving into Wikipedia articles about the ruins of Pompeii and learning how to bake Panis Quadratus, an ancient …

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