An LLM From 1930 An LLM from 1930

talkie: a 13B language model trained only on pre-1931 text. no modern web, no leakage, no awareness of anything after 1930. that last part is what’s wild.

think about what this unlocks – archaeology, historiography, counterfactual history, reviewing past predictions of the future from the inside. every historian alive is contaminated by knowing what came next. talkie isn’t.

it’s also, i’d argue, the closest thing to a time travel experience we’ll ever get. physics doesn’t permit the real version in either direction (forward you just wait, backward causality says no). a conversation with something whose worldview ends in 1930, with no memory of WW2, no Hitler, no internet, is functionally the same trick.

now imagine the 17th century version. that’s the door this opens 🤯