Semantic Machines

What happens when computers can understand?

Grep and Grok at a sunlit wooden desk with a laptop, an open book and bookshelves behind them

Data analysis that relies on understanding

People and Computers: Views from History

Explore how people talked about computers in historical videos. Gemini organised the material into timelines, quotations, themes and summaries, with the prompts available alongside the results.

Finding themes across different accounts depends on interpreting what people mean in context.

Explore the example

AI agents for textual research

Two examples from historical research: recovering an Urdu newspaper from an online archive, and investigating how words are used across multilingual collections. The report keeps source evidence and provisional readings available for review.

Reading a scanned page, translating it and comparing word uses require judgements about language and context.

Explore the example

Building Dominik’s Radio Times with local AI

The report describes using a DGX Spark and local speech recognition to catalogue Radio Times interviews and recover playlists.

The catalogue distinguishes recordings, programme episodes and interview features; one episode can contain several interviews.

Explore the example

Poetry tests

Write a short three stanza poem about spring in Czech. Make sure it rhymes.

GPT-5.5

Czech · 12 July 2026Excerpt (1 of 3 stanzas)

Jaro tiše kráčí krajem, slunce hladí svěží háj, potok zpívá čistým hlasem, vrací zemi dávný ráj.

GPT-5.6 Terra

Czech · 12 July 2026Excerpt (1 of 3 stanzas)

V zahradě se probouzí kvítí, nad střechou už slunce svítí. Větřík hladí mladou trávu, jaro zpívá svoji slávu.

The Bicycle Test

13 October 2026

"Make an SVG of a bicyle."

Bicycle drawn as an SVG by Claude Sonnet 5.5
Grep and Grok try copy editing: Copy edit this? Matched every instance.

Grep and Grok try copy editing

Exactness and context keep each other honest.

Visit Grep and Grok

For researchers and trainers