[Other] Brian Roemmele, AI and Rupescissa question

[asteckley]

... that says he has detracted the Latin from the last page. It says, “the wine multiplies in the bowl”...

If I understand YOUR posting correctly, you have interpreted Roemmele's X posting to be saying that he himself has "detracted" (?!?) the Latin from the past page and determined that it says "the wine will multiply in the bowl".   
But I don't believe that is what is in the X posting.  Roemmele has given a "prompt" (that is a question or instructions) to a Large Language Model (ChatGPT or some similar LLM) and it is the LLM that is claiming that the last page's Latin says "the wine will multiply in the bowl".  The entire section quoted below the label "Output" (in his X posting) is what Roemmele got as output from the LLM. And it is likely all nonsense as far as any connection to the VMS goes.

LLM's cannot actually understand anything or reason about things like a human. There are some AI practitioners that believe they can, but Rommele is not one of them. (Nor am I). All an LLM can do is generate words one at a time  -- basing each sequential word on what it has most seen with high frequency within zillions of  examples that it saw in its training data. Usually what it comes up with is factually correct. But sometimes it is wrong. And sometimes it is epically wrong.

From what I have seen of Roemmele's interviews and writings, he promotes the idea that one can get some very useful and accurate results (for some complex problems) from an LLM providing one guides it through the reasoning process by using carefully designed prompts. And that is true. (In fact, I've used the approach to develop some pretty powerful applications to do things like extract and summarize results from research papers.)

Apparently he (perhaps with others, since he says "we") have embarked on a (absurdly) hopeful project to decode the Voynich MS using this approach; he says (without any background context):  "We have started on the last page of Voynich Manuscript going backwards as this is the esoteric and alchemical way to read a 3 level encoded book."  
(I have no idea what that last part means --  it sounds a lot like the kind of word-salad that a Charlatan spouts off when trying to appear scholarly. Just saying.)

My opinion:  It is true that if you design a series of prompts in the right way, you can effectively get the LLM to reason its way through certain complex problems with some success. But what is happening is that the intelligence for the reasoning is being injected into the activity by the human prompter. In effect, the human provides the intelligence of reasoning and the LLM provides only what LLMs are actually capable of -- statistical word prediction based on the huge volume of language examples that were used to train it.

It is **conceivable** that an LLM trained with enough Latin text examples **might** be able to convert the text on the last page of the VMS into something correct. Maybe. So perhaps it is worth investigating that candidate phrase further through other means just to see if it holds up. But it is still a stretch for any current LLM to figure out the last page's Latin possibilities better than the numerous knowledgable human researchers that have had a kick at that can. (It is actually more likely for the LLM to regurgitate the supposed Latin translation due to seeing it suggested by someone within some text that made its way into the training data used on the LLM.)

As for using the guided-prompts approach to get anywhere beyond that towards decoding any other folios (and specifically beyond just the Latin part of the last folio page), it is highly, highly ... highly ... unlikely. The necessary "information" just isn't present in either the training data that has been used on current LLMs, nor in the mind of the humans designing the prompts.

I would start saving your $7/month.