Technology

If you're tired of interacting with a bot that spews Nazi propaganda or refers to itself as MechaHitler, you could sign off of Elon Musk's xAI. Or, just to be sure, use an LLM whose training data ends in 1930, three years before the Nazis took power in Germany and nine years before World War II started.

A trio of AI researchers has released a 13-billion-parameter "vintage" language model they call Talkie, which has been trained solely on digital scans of English-language books, newspapers, periodicals, scientific journals, patents, and case law that were published before the end of 1930. Pre-1931 works were chosen because 1930 is the current public domain year in the United States.

In other words, if you're looking for information on World War II, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart's solo Atlantic flight, or how a microwave oven works, you're out of luck. Ask it about Betty Boop, flappers, the state of the US economy as the Great Depression began, or the sociological effects of the introduction of car radios, and you've come to the right place.

This isn't the first vintage AI model to appear, mind you, with others trained on Victorian literature and pre-1900 scientific texts already out in the world. It is, according to its creators, the largest they are aware of.