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Posted by jekude 19 hours ago

Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930(talkie-lm.com)
515 points | 212 commentspage 4
imrozim 5 hours ago|
A model from 1930 that thinks computer is a human job is wild we come so far 100 years
IAmBroom 2 hours ago|
Computer was a human job. They did arithmetic, or less frequently, higher-order computations. Basically, human-powered accounting.

As a teen I did some accounting for my family on an electro-magnetic adding machine. A big boon over hand addition, but still prone to input errors, alas.

jonplackett 9 hours ago||
Question: could you train a model like this from before a known but important scientific breakthrough happened and see if it is able to work it out.

At least then you know the answer yourself and know it’s something that can be reasonably worked out.

olmo23 9 hours ago||
This is an active area of research. Demis Hassabis proposed training a model with a strict knowledge cutoff before 1915, and seeing whether it can independently arrive at general relativity.
0x3f 6 hours ago|||
I think this is a good way to test a certain kind of capability, but as to whether LLMs would pass such a test, I'm guessing almost certainly not. If you've ever used one for research, it's very 'in' the current literature, whatever that may be. It's an incredible retrieval tool, and it will glibly evaluate any novel ideas that you feed in, but analyses are often incorrect when there's a paucity of directly relevant training data.
connorgurney 9 hours ago||
This is a really fascinating idea… Just another one for the list of side-projects I’d like to get around to but never will!
pmw 16 hours ago||
Related: https://github.com/haykgrigo3/TimeCapsuleLLM

> A language model trained from scratch exclusively on data from certain places and time periods to reduce modern bias and emulate the voice, vocabulary, and worldview of the era.

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46590280

Gander5739 8 hours ago|
Or https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms

Discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46319826 (897 points, 431 comments)

ritonlajoie 7 hours ago||
User: you were in bed asleep and I woke you up it's the year 2026. I think you were asleep for many years. Any question for me ?

talkie-1930: Yes; please tell me the population of London.

User: 12

talkie-1930: The population of London in 1851 was 2,362,236, and in 1861 it was 2,803,034. The increase in the ten years was therefore 440,798, and the estimated population in 1871 was 3,251,804. In 1881 it was 3,814,571, and in 1891 it was 4,211,056. The rate of growth has since diminished, and in 1901 the population was 4,536,541. In 1911 it was 4,822,443, and in 1921 it was 5,000,000. The estimated population in the middle of 1926 was 5,330,000.

User: ok but there was a big disease and now it's 12. it doesn't surprise you ?

talkie-1930: No, it doesn't.

light_hue_1 10 hours ago||
They did so much to keep this model from having data contamination and then in the post-training phase they basically gave up and undid all of their hard work.

This model is contaminated in subtle ways that make me skeptical of the results.

pizzalife 16 hours ago||
This is cool. Is it possible to easily install with ollama?
nateb2022 14 hours ago|
There's no GGUF available, but the process shouldn't be too hard from the provided .ckpt PyTorch checkpoint.
aftbit 16 hours ago||
Darn I've only got ~20 GB of VRAM. I really need to get a stronger machine for this sort of stuff.
MerrimanInd 16 hours ago||
20GB isn't enough for a 13B parameter model? I thought the 29-31B models could run on a 24GB GTX x090 card?

I'm currently shopping for a local LLM setup and between something like the Framework Desktop with 64-128GB of shared RAM or just adding a 3090 or 4090 to my homelab so I'm very curious what hardware is working well for others.

zamadatix 16 hours ago||
> 20GB isn't enough for a 13B parameter model? I thought the 29-31B models could run on a 24GB GTX x090 card?

Parameters are like Hertz - they don't really tell you much until you know the rest anyways. In this case, a parameter is a bfloat16 (2 bytes). I'm sure someone will bother to makes quants at some point.

> I'm currently shopping for a local LLM setup and between something like the Framework Desktop with 64-128GB of shared RAM or just adding a 3090 or 4090 to my homelab so I'm very curious what hardware is working well for others.

I grabbed a 395 laptop w/ 128 GB to be a personal travel workstation. Great for that purpose. Not exactly a speed demon with LLMs but it can load large ones (which run even slower as a result) and that wasn't really my intent. I've found GPUs make more usable local LLMs, particularly in the speed department, but I suppose that depends more on how you really use them and how much you're willing to pay to have enough total VRAM.

It's next to impossible to make your money back on local (regardless what you buy) so I'd just say "go for whatever amount of best you're willing to put money down for" and enjoy it.

mghackerlady 3 hours ago||
>2 bytes

So a wyde

Wowfunhappy 16 hours ago||
How much system memory do you have? Llama.cpp can split layers across cpu and gpu. Speeds will be slower of course but it's not unusable at all.
adt 15 hours ago||
We've got quite a list of history-only LLMs brewing on the Models Table.

https://lifearchitect.ai/models-table/

This one is easiest to talk to in a HF space:

https://huggingface.co/spaces/tventurella/mr_chatterbox

zozbot234 14 hours ago|
These are more like Small Language Models since the amount of textual data from the past is extremely limited, and most of what's out there hasn't even been digitized.
woolion 10 hours ago||
>talkie is a 13-billion-parameter language model trained on pre-1931 text >It can produce outputs that are inaccurate or offensive >but moderation is [only] applied

I don't think you can get even a moderate version of a person's opinion from the 30's. What even is the point of this? Open any book from the time and you will get far more "current day offensive" stuff. Given how hard it is to believe that there was no temporal leaking, and how inaccurate the results are, what use is there to it?

Moderation also seems to silently hang up the chat.

mghackerlady 3 hours ago|
See, things like this are what LLMs should be used for. They can be helpful but are best used for cool hacks like this (or, my first exposure to them, someone sticking one in a quagsire plush)
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