About this episode

The episode explores Talkie, a 13-billion-parameter AI trained on pre-1931 literature and its implications for AI reasoning and understanding.

We dive into Talkie, a 13‑billion‑parameter AI raised in a sealed pre‑1931 library. Trained on 260 billion words published before 1931 and guided by etiquette manuals, Victorian prose, and historical letters, Talkie challenges our ideas of AI reasoning, generalization, and how a mind built from the past perceives the future. We explore how it learns to converse without modern data, its surprising ability to encode modern concepts like programming languages, and the engineering battles against...

People in this episode

Host: Mike Breault

Topics covered

• AI
• history
• language processing
• technology
• ethics

Keywords

• AI
• Talkie
• 1930s
• language
• programming
• historical literature
• machine learning

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Talkie

Books & works: Victorian prose

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