Afghanistan, Oct. 4 -- A coded French military letter dating to 1809 has been deciphered with the help of artificial intelligence after remaining unread for more than two centuries, revealing details about French and allied troop positions on the eve of Napoleon Bonaparte's war with Austria.
The letter was not written by Napoleon himself. Napoleon ordered his stepson, Eugene de Beauharnais, then Viceroy of Italy, to send the coded message to General Auguste de Marmont, whose French forces were stationed in Dalmatia, in present-day Croatia.
Carter Church, an artificial intelligence engineer at cybersecurity company SentinelOne, said he used OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra model to transcribe and decipher the document from a single scanned image. The ...