Nat Friedman

Nat Friedman’s fingerprints can be found across the AI landscape. He and his close collaborator Daniel Gross run one of the world’s most powerful chip clusters and a GPU rental service. They invest hundreds of millions of dollars into rising AI companies like Perplexity and ElevenLabs. Friedman is so well regarded in Silicon Valley that he was also reportedly offered the interim CEO role at OpenAI after Sam Altman was briefly ousted last December.

But perhaps the most interesting AI project that Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub, was involved in last year involved some ancient scrolls. Friedman spearheaded and bankrolled the Vesuvius Challenge, which prompted computer scientists to try to decode Roman scrolls that were buried under 20 meters of ash and mud when Mount Vesuvius erupted nearly 2,000 years ago. The efforts were successful thanks to machine learning, and gave the world another glimpse into antiquity: an essay that explored the relationship between scarcity and pleasure. “I can't help but read it as a 2,000 year old blog post, arguing with another poster,” Friedman told TIME in February. “It's ancient Substack, and people are beefing with each other, and I think that's just amazing.”