Meet Talkie-13B — a «vintage» language model with a 1930 knowledge cutoff

While it can be fascinating to talk to an LLM «from the past,» it also prompts questions of scientific discovery and the limitations of large language models.

For example, you can ask it if Hitler will ever be Chancellor of Germany, or culturally, what it thinks of black folk.

The real question is perhaps whether it will be able to discover anything «new,» that we can test, as in what it thinks about splitting the atom, and if it will ever be possible. Will Talkie ever predict the new science — or the wars — of the 1940s?

The model itself was painstakingly made on collected data before its 1930 cutoff (because copyright expired), and only uses English data — from books, periodicals, newspapers, scientific journals, patents and court documents.

The result is an LLM that lives in the past, that might do scientific discovery and that serves at least as a nice cultural window on times gone by.

You can try it on Hugging Face, and download it from Github.

Read more: Introducing Talkie, Gizmodo. Discussion on r/Singularity.