"Talkie, let us discuss cricket, not eugenics" Rogistok/Shutterstock There are various LLMs that focus on public domain texts, for ethical or experimental reasons, but most also incorporate modern material (such as Wikipedia) so they have a fully contemporary awareness of history, society, current events and the rest of it. Talkie , however, is a 13B-parameter language model exclusively trained on English texts prior to 1931 . talkie-1930-13b-it was finetuned using a novel dataset of instruction-response pairs extracted from pre-1931 reference works, including etiquette manuals, encyclopedias, and letter-writing manuals. The model then underwent reinforcement learning (online DPO with an LLM-as-a-judge) to improve instruction-following ability. The result is like talking to an educated gentleman of the high imperial era. He is fascinating, amazingly well-read for the time, and yet full of bad ideas. What ideas? Oh, you know the ones.…