Luke Farritor
I'm a 22 year old engineer who currently lives in Silicon Valley. I'm best known for winning the Vesuvius Challenge, an ongoing project to decipher the only surviving library from the Roman Empire.
X, GitHub, Instagram, Linkedin
Currently, I am:
Long term goals:
- Start, grow and lead multiple tech companies.
- Read the rest of the scrolls, kickstart molecular nanotechnology, and contribute to other under-explored scientific ideas.
- Get married, have several kids.
- Membership at Sand Hills Golf Club.
- Worthy side quests as they arise.
Past work:
- Winner of the Vesuvius Challenge
- The Vesuvius Challenge is a competition led by Nat Friedman to use AI to decipher CT scans of the Herculaneum Papyri, a library of 300+ damaged scrolls from the Pompeii eruption.
- I trained the first model to successfully read inside the scrolls and found the breakthrough first word inside a scroll, πορφύρας ("purple").
- Worked with Youssef Nader and Julian Schilliger to decipher 15 paragraphs from a scroll, winning the grand prize.
- Our work was covered in thousands of media outlets, the best articles include this one (Bloomberg, ungated) and this one (WSJ).
- As we scan and read the rest of the library, the project will roughly double the amount of text we have from the Roman Empire.
- Ongoing work is supported by a 2m gift from the Musk Foundation.
- SpaceX Starship
- Interned on the Launchpad Software team at Starbase from January through July 2023.
- Was responsible for several mission-critical projects leading up to Starship Flights 1 and 2.
- SpaceX Starlink
- Worked as an intern on the Starlink Wifi Software Team in summer 2022.
- Wrote a custom DNS backend in support of Starlink Aviation.
- I interned at Marble, a meat processing robotics startup, in 2021.
- Also in 2021, I interned at John Deere/Blue River, where I did lidar sensor testing for robotics R&D.
- I co-created Soundtracks for the Present Future, an art installation of computer-controlled guitars. video
- In high school I helped create MyLink, an app/website that serves as a database of charitable resources for people in need across the state of Nebraska.
Other:
- I am part of Emergent Ventures and the Thiel Fellowship.
- I studied Computer Science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, dropping out a few months before graduation.
- I was homeschooled, and took classes at the local high school to play varsity golf.
- I was born and raised in the suburbs of Lincoln, Nebraska.
- My parents and entire extended family are from rural Nebraska, where the Farritor Family homesteaded in the 1800s after coming from Ireland.