Talkie: A Vintage Language Model from 1930
UW Memorial Library 728 State St., Madison, Wisconsin
The start of “training” an artificial intelligence program is to feed it large amounts of written material. What would result if a program only was given material from long ago? That question is being explored with talkie, a language model only provided text from before 1931. Two of the researchers on the project, Nick Levine and Alec Radford, will discuss their findings during this lecture.
media release: Join researchers Nick Levine and Alec Radford for a presentation on Talkie-LM, an AI language model trained strictly on pre-1931 books, newspapers, and archival print. Featured on the Hard Fork podcast, this talk explores how models reason without modern internet contamination, addressing key questions about historical simulation, data stewardship, and the ethics of digital archives.
