Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT are trained to recognize patterns in written texts, helping them to choose a statistically probable word to complete a sentence. Palaeontologists have now trained a similar model on fossil records instead of words, then used it to reconstruct a timeline of changes in Earth's biodiversity over hundreds of millions of years in unprecedented detail. This big-data approach to interpreting the rock record ' the field known as stratigraphy ' could spur a rethink of major upheavals in the history of life, the model's developers say. For instance, the model suggests that three of the 'Big Five' mass-extinction events were gradual declines in biodiversity, rather than the sudden cataclysms described by other reconstructions. The model is 'a real revolution for studying stratigraphy and past diversity change', says Shuzhong Shen, a palaeontologist at Nanjing University in China, who presented the research at a meeting of the Geological...
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