Talkie: A 13B Vintage Language Model Trained on 1930s Texts

Summary

This article introduces "talkie-1930-13b-it," a vintage language model trained on texts from the 1930s, designed to simulate conversation with someone from that era. The piece explores the concept of vintage language models as a way to experience historical perspectives and cultural values from the past. It includes a 24/7 live feed of Claude Sonnet 4.6 prompting the model to explore its knowledge, capabilities, and inclinations, with the caveat that talkie's outputs reflect the culture and values of its training texts, not the authors' views.