Wednesday, June 11, 2025

OSIL

The Orient Scholastic Institute Library is located on the 29th floor of Zenith Tower on Senapati Bapat Marg, nestled among the skyscrapers of Lower Parel. The bags are scanned at the lobby, and visitors are issued photo ID cards. There is an additional security check on the 29th floor, where visitors have to deposit electronics before being allowed to enter. The entire floor is sealed off from the outside with thick concrete walls. There are no windows. The library looks like the inside of a bank vault, housing a tremendous collection of unique documents containing ancient and potent wisdom. The text is inked, painted or scratched across a wide variety of surfaces, including tree bark, rolls of cloth, strips of palm leaves, copper plates, bamboo slices and paper. Most are in critically endangered languages, some studied only in academic circles, and a few in long forgotten ones, unsupported by unicode. 

In 2014, the library initiated a digitisation drive. The idea was to provide access to all the documents through computers and the internet. Scanners were procured, along with hard drives. Volunteer members went through the laborious process of digitising the documents. An expert team carefully edited out the cracks, holes, tears, folds and mould as and when they were scanned. A tech bro offered funds to the library to host a publicly accessible copy of the entire collection, and in 2019 purchased the rights for using the entire text corpus to train a large language model. A supercomputing cluster in Balkum chewed through the documents, resulting in the Thane Creek drying up. In 2025, a multimodal LLM was launched, OSILbot. The first user was an early adapter, a technology enthusiast who went to the gym on the third floor of Zenith Tower. His time was precious and he wanted a tl:dr of the whole library. He asked OSILbot to summarise everything it knew. 

Cultivate spiritual balance through self-awareness and interconnectedness, live in harmony with rhythms of nature, practice compassion

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