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talkie vintage 1930 language model release
Introducing talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930
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1 expertWhat remains unresolved or contested.
“It's a good question, and one someone tried out! With an LLM trained only on pre-1930 text they were able to teach it to write python code with just a few examples simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/28/...”
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1 expertBackground, chronology and why it matters.
“Like the entire point of an LLM is that it can generalize based on instructions. People have proven this! Go look at the source here; a LLM trained only on pre-1930s text was able to write python based on in-context examples. simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/28/...”
2 experts discussed this · 8 posts
brennan: love the sign off "for more information, follow <the person most famously wrong about all of this for years>"
Pwnallthethings: There's several examples of it, not least of all in math and engineering. But the reason *why* LLMs are good at that is because beyond a certain point, predicting words hyper-accurately requires so…
Pwnallthethings: I mean, the math cases are the most impressive because math *is* formal reasoning. That's ultimately what solving a math problem means
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