Talkie-1930: 13B Open-Weight Language Model Trained Exclusively on Pre-1931 Text — Alec Radford's New Research Project

r/singularity·high signal

AI researchers Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (GPT/GPT-2/Whisper co-creator) released Talkie, a 13B parameter language model trained on 260B tokens of exclusively pre-1931 English text. The model serves as a clean testbed for generalization experiments — including whether an LLM with zero knowledge of digital computers can learn Python from in-context examples alone. Hit 1,031 upvotes on r/singularity with 213 comments; available as both base and instruction-tuned variants on HuggingFace.