How can we interact with such models? Is there a web application interface?

i feel like this would be super useful for unique marketing copy and writing. The responses sound so sophisticated like I read it in my grandfather's tone and cadence.

Very neat! I've thought about this with frontier models because they're ignorant of recent events, though it's too bad old frontier models just kind of disappear into the aether when a company moves on to the next iteration. Every company's frontier model today is a time capsule for the future. There should probably be some kind of preservation attempts made early so they don't wind up simply deleted; once we're in Internet time, sifting through the data to ensure scrapes are accurately dated becomes a nightmare unless you're doing your own regular Internet scrapes over a long time.

It would be nice to go back substantially further, though it's not too far back that the commoner becomes voiceless in history and we just get a bunch of politics and academia. Great job; look forward to testing it out.

A question for those who think LLM’s are the path to artificial intelligence: if a large language model trained on pre-1913 data is a window into the past, how is a large language model trained on pre-2025 data not effectively the same thing?

I would love to see this done, by year.

"Give me an LLM from 1928."

etc.

smbc did a comic about this: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/copyright The punchline is that the moral and ethical norms of pre-1913 texts are not exactly compatible with modern norms.

You think Albert is going to stay in Zurich or emigrate?

Ontologically, this historical model understands the categories of "Man" and "Woman" just as well as a modern model does. The difference lies entirely in the attributes attached to those categories. The sexism is a faithful map of that era's statistical distribution.

You could RAG-feed this model the facts of WWII, and it would technically "know" about Hitler. But it wouldn't share the modern sentiment or gravity. In its latent space, the vector for "Hitler" has no semantic proximity to "Evil".

That Adolf Hitler seems to be a hallucination. There's totally nothing googlable about him. Also what could be the language his works were translated from, into German?

The knowledge machine question is fascinating ("Imagine you had access to a machine embodying all the collective knowledge of your ancestors. What would you ask it?") – it truly does not know about computers, has no concept of its own substrate. But a knowledge machine is still comprehensible to it.

It makes me think of the Book Of Ember, the possibility of chopping things out very deliberately. Maybe creating something that could wonder at its own existence, discovering well beyond what it could know. And then of course forgetting it immediately, which is also a well-worn trope in speculative fiction.