14 ms·
History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts
- monegator 10mo agoI hereby declare that ANYTHING other than the mainstream tools (GPT, Claude, ...) is an incredibly interesting and legit use of LLMs.
- dkalola 10mo agoHow can we interact with such models? Is there a web application interface?
- superkuh 10mo agosmbc did a comic about this: http://smbc-comics.com/comic/copyright http://smbc-comics.com/comic/copyright The punchline is that the moral and ethical norms of pre-1913 texts are not exactly compatible with modern norms.
- GaryBluto 10mo agoThat's the point of this project, to have an LLM that reflects the moral and ethical norms of pre-1913 texts.
- saaaaaam 10mo ago“Time-locked models don't roleplay; they embody their training data. Ranke-4B-1913 doesn't know about WWI because WWI hasn't happened in its textual universe. It can be surprised by your questions in ways modern LLMs cannot.” “Modern LLMs suffer from hindsight contamination. GPT-5 knows how the story ends—WWI, the League's failure, the Spanish flu.” This is really fascinating. As someone who reads a lot of history and historical fiction I think this is really intriguing. Imagine having a conversation with someone genuinely from the period, where they don’t know the “end of the story”.
- observationist 10mo agoThis is definitely fascinating - being able to do AI brain surgery, and selectively tuning its knowledge and priors, you'd be able to create awesome and terrifying simulations.
- eek2121 10mo agoRespectfully, LLMs are nothing like a brain, and I discourage comparisons between the two, because beyond a complete difference in the way they operate, a brain can innovate, and as of this moment, an LLM cannot because it relies on previously available information. LLMs are just seemingly intelligent autocomplete engines, and until they figure a way to stop the hallucinations, they aren't great either. Every piece of code a developer churns out using LLMs will be built from previous code that other developers have written (including both strengths and weaknesses, btw). Every paragraph you ask it to write in a summary? Same. Every single other problem? Same. Ask it to generate a summary of a document? Don't trust it here either. [Note, expect cyber-attacks later on regarding this scenario, it is beginning to happen -- documents made intentionally obtuse to fool an LLM into hallucinating about the document, which leads to someone signing a contract, conning the person out of millions]. If you ask an LLM to solve something no human has, you'll get a fabrication, which has fooled quite a few folks and caused them to jeopardize their career (lawyers, etc) which is why I am posting this.
- libraryofbabel 10mo agoThis is the 2023 take on LLMs. It still gets repeated a lot. But it doesn’t really hold up anymore - it’s more complicated than that. Don’t let some factoid about how they are pretrained on autocomplete-like next token prediction fool you into thinking you understand what is going on in that trillion parameter neural network. Sure, LLMs do not think like humans and they may not have human-level creativity. Sometimes they hallucinate. But they can absolutely solve new problems that aren’t in their training set, e.g. some rather difficult problems on the last Mathematical Olympiad. They don’t just regurgitate remixes of their training data. If you don’t believe this, you really need to spend more time with the latest SotA models like Opus 4.5 or Gemini 3. Nontrivial emergent behavior is a thing. It will only get more impressive. That doesn’t make LLMs like humans (and we shouldn’t anthropomorphize them) but they are not “autocomplete on steroids” anymore either.
- xg15 10mo ago"...what do you mean, 'World War One?'"
- tejohnso 10mo agoI remember reading a children's book when I was young and the fact that people used the phrase "World War One" rather than "The Great War" was a clue to the reader that events were taking place in a certain time period. Never forgot that for some reason. I failed to catch the clue, btw.
- bradfitz 10mo agoI seem to recall reading that as a kid too, but I can't find it now. I keep finding references to "Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective" about a Civil War sword being fake (instead of a Great War one), but with the same plot I'd remembered.
- michaericalribo 10mo agoCan confirm, it was an Encyclopedia Brown book and it was World War One vs the Great War that gave away the sword as a counterfeit!
- JuniperMesos 10mo agoThe Encyclopedia Brown story I remember reading as a kid involved a Civil War era sword with an inscription saying it was given on the occasion of the First Battle of Bull Run. The clues that the sword was a modern fake were the phrasing "First Battle of Bull Run", but also that the sword was gifted on the Confederate side, and the Confederates would've called the battle "Manassas Junction". The wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bull_Run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Bull_Run says the Confederate name was "First Manassas" (I might be misremembering exactly what this book I read as a child said). Also I'm pretty sure it was specifically "Encyclopedia Brown Solves Them All" that this mystery appeared in. If someone has a copy of the book or cares to dig it up, they could confirm my memory.
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- jscyc 10mo agoWhen you put it that way it reminds me of the Severn/Keats character in the Hyperion Cantos. Far-future AIs reconstruct historical figures from their writings in an attempt to gain philosophical insights.
- bikeshaving 10mo agoThis isn’t science fiction anymore. CIA is using chatbot simulations of world leaders to inform analysts. https://archive.ph/9KxkJ https://archive.ph/9KxkJ
- NuclearPM 10mo ago[flagged]
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 10mo agoInteresting. Would you be ok disclosing the following: - Are you ( edit: on a ) paid version? - If paid, which model you used? - Can you share exact prompt? I am genuinely asking for myself. I have never received an answer this direct, but I accept there is a level of variability.
- ghurtado 10mo agoDepending on which prompt you used, and the training cutoff, this could be anywhere from completely unremarkable to somewhat interesting.
- BoredPositron 10mo agoI call bullshit because of tone and grammar. Share the chat.
- DonHopkins 10mo agoOnce there was Fake News. Now there is Fake ChatGPT.
- 10mo ago
- culi 10mo agoI used to follow this blog — I believe it was somehow associated with Slate Star Codex? — anyways, I remember the author used to do these experiments on themselves where they spent a week or two only reading newspapers/media from a specific point in time and then wrote a blog about their experiences/takeaways On that same note, there was this great YouTube series called The Great War. It spanned from 2014-2018 (100 years after WW1) and followed WW1 developments week by week.
- tyre 10mo agoThe Great War series is phenomenal. A truly impressive project.
- verve_rat 10mo agoThe people that did the Great War series (at least some of them, I believe there was a little bit of a falling out) went on to do a WWII version on the World War II channel: https://youtube.com/@worldwartwo https://youtube.com/@worldwartwo They are currently in the middle of a Korean War version: https://youtube.com/@thekoreanwarbyindyneidell https://youtube.com/@thekoreanwarbyindyneidell
- rcpt 10mo agoWatching a modern LLM chat with this would be fun.
- Sieyk 10mo agoI was going to say the same thing. Its really hard to explain the concept of "convincing but undoubtedly pretending", yet they captured that concept so beautifully here.
- ghurtado 10mo agoThis might just be the closest we get to a time machine for some time. Or maybe ever. Every "King Arthur travels to the year 2000" kinda script is now something that writes itself. > Imagine having a conversation with someone genuinely from the period, Imagine not just someone, but Aristotle or Leonardo or Kant!
- RobotToaster 10mo agoI imagine King Arthur would say something like: Hwæt spricst þu be?
- yorwba 10mo agoWrong language. The Arthur of legend is a Celtic-speaking Briton fighting against the Germanic-speaking invaders. Old English developed from the language of his enemies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_language_decline_in_England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_language_decline_in_Eng...
- anthk 10mo agoEasier with Cervantes for Spanish speakers than King Arhur or Shakespeare. With Alphonse X, o The Cid, it would be greater issues, but understandable over weeks.
- Davidbrcz 10mo agoThat's some Westworld level of discussion
- psychoslave 10mo ago>Imagine having a conversation with someone genuinely from the period, where they don’t know the “end of the story”. Isn't this part of the basics feature of human conditions? Not only we are all unaware of the coming historic outcome (though we can get some big points with more or less good guesses), but to a marginally variable extend, we are also very unaware of past and present history. LLM are not aware, but they can be trained on larger historical accounts than any human and regurgitate syntactically correct summary on any point within it. Very different kind of utterer.
- pwillia7 10mo agocaptain hindsight
- psychoslave 10mo agoActually, this made me discover the character, thanks. I see your point and get the fun out of myself. On the other hand, at least in this case I don't pretend to cover some catastrophic results. :)
- pwillia7 10mo agoThis is why the impersonation stuff is so interesting with LLMs -- If you ask chatGPT a question without a 'right' answer, and then tell it to embody someone you really want to ask that question to, you'll get a better answer with the impersonation. Now, is this the same phenomenon that causes people to lose their minds with the LLMs? Possibly. Is it really cool asking followup philosophy questions to the LLM Dalai Lama after reading his book? Yes.
- Sprotch 10mo agoNice idea, does not work
- pwillia7 10mo agoIn which way?
- staticman2 10mo agoWhy is that cool? Imagine you are a billionaire so money is no object and really interested in the Dhali Llama? Would you read the book then hire someone to pretend to be the author and ask questions that are not covered by the book? Then be enraptured by whatever the roleplayer invents? Probably not? At least this isn't a phenomenon I've heard of?
- anshumankmr 10mo ago>where they don’t know the “end of the story”. Applicable to us also, cause we do not know how the current story ends either, of the post pandemic world as we know it now.
- DGoettlich 10mo agoexactly
- ViktorRay 10mo agoReminds me of this scene from a Doctor Who episode https://youtu.be/eg4mcdhIsvU https://youtu.be/eg4mcdhIsvU I’m not a Doctor Who fan and haven’t seen the rest of the episode and I don’t even what this episode was about but I thought this scene was excellent.
- takeda 10mo ago> This is really fascinating. As someone who reads a lot of history and historical fiction I think this is really intriguing. Imagine having a conversation with someone genuinely from the period, where they don’t know the “end of the story”. Having the facts from the era is one thing, to make conclusions about things it doesn't know would require intelligence.
- dr-detroit 10mo ago[dead]
- LordDragonfang 10mo agoPerhaps I'm overly sensitive to this and terminally online, but that first quote reads as a textbook LLM-generated sentence. "<Thing> doesn't <action>, it <shallow description that's slightly off from how you would expect a human to choose>" Later parts of the readme (whole section of bullets enumerating what it is and what it isn't, another LLM favorite) make me more confident that significant parts of the readme is generated. I'm generally pro-AI, but if you spend hundreds of hours making a thing, I'd rather hear your explanation of it, not an LLM's.
- Sprotch 10mo agoThis is the point - a modern LLM "role playing" pre-1913 would only reflect our view today of what someone from that era would say. It woud not be accurate.
- diamond559 10mo agoYeah, whenever we figure out time travel that will be really cool. In the meantime we have autocorrect trained on internet facts and modern textbooks that can never truly understand anything let alone what is was like to live hundreds of years ago.
- throawayonthe 10mo agoi get what you're saying, but the post is specifically about models that were not trained on the internet/modern textbooks
- Heliodex 10mo agoThe sample responses given are fascinating. It seems more difficult than normal to even tell that they were generated by an LLM, since most of us (terminally online) people have been training our brains' AI-generated text detection on output from models trained with a recent cutoff date. Some of the sample responses seem so unlike anything an LLM would say, obviously due to its apparent beliefs on certain concepts, though also perhaps less obviously due to its word choice and sentence structure making the responses feel slightly 'old-fashioned'.
- _--__--__ 10mo agoThe time cutoff probably matters but maybe not as much as the lack of human finetuning from places like Nigeria with somewhat foreign styles of English. I'm not really sure if there is as much of an 'obvious LLM text style' in other languages, it hasn't seemed that way in my limited attempts to speak to LLMs in languages I'm studying.
- anonymous908213 10mo agoThere is. I have observed it in both Chinese and Japanese.
- d3m0t3p 10mo agoThe model is fined tuned for chat behavior. So the style might be due to - Fine tuning - More Stylised text in the corpus, english evolved a lot in the last century.
- paul_h 10mo agoDiverged as well as standardized. I did some research into "out of pocket" and how it differs in meaning in UK-English (paying from one's own funds) and American-English (uncontactable) and I recall 1908 being the current thought as to when the divergence happened: 1908 short story by O. Henry titled "Buried Treasure."
- libraryofbabel 10mo agoI used to teach 19th-century history, and the responses definitely sound like a Victorian-era writer. And they of course sound like writing (books and periodicals etc) rather than "chat": as other responders allude to, the fine-tuning or RL process for making them good at conversation was presumably quite different from what is used for most chatbots, and they're leaning very heavily into the pre-training texts. We don't have any living Victorians to RLHF on: we just have what they wrote. To go a little deeper on the idea of 19th-century "chat": I did a PhD on this period and yet I would be hard-pushed to tell you what actual 19th-century conversations were like. There are plenty of literary depictions of conversation from the 19th century of presumably varying levels of accuracy, but we don't really have great direct historical sources of everyday human conversations until sound recording technology got good in the 20th century. Even good 19th-century transcripts of actual human speech tend to be from formal things like court testimony or parliamentary speeches, not everyday interactions. The vast majority of human communication in the premodern past was the spoken word, and it's almost all invisible in the historical sources. Anyway, this is a really interesting project, and I'm looking forward to trying the models out myself!
- Teever 10mo agoThis is a neat idea. I've been wondering for a while now about using these kinds of models to compare architectures. I'd love to see the output from different models trained on pre-1905 about special/general relativity ideas. It would be interesting to see what kind of evidence would persuade them of new kinds of science, or to see if you could have them 'prove' it be devising experiments and then giving them simulated data from the experiments to lead them along the correct sequence of steps to come to a novel (to them) conclusion.
- andy99 10mo agoI’d like to know how they chat-tuned it. Getting the base model is one thing, did they also make a bunch of conversations for SFT and if so how was it done? We develop chatbots while minimizing interference with the normative judgments acquired during pretraining (“uncontaminated bootstrapping”). So they are chat tuning, I wonder what “minimizing interference with normative judgements” really amounts to and how objective it is.
- jeffjeffbear 10mo agoThey have some more details at https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms/blob/main/ranke-4b/prerelease_notes.md#chat-responses-via-supervised-fine-tuning https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms/blob/main/ranke-4... Basically using GPT-5 and being careful
- andy99 10mo agoI wonder if they know about this, basically training on LLM output can transmit information or characteristics not explicitly included https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/ https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/ I’m curious, they have the example of raw base model output; when LLMs were first identified as zero shot chatbots there was usually a prompt like “A conversation between a person and a helpful assistant” that preceded the chat to get it to simulate a chat. Could they have tried a prefix like “Correspondence between a gentleman and a knowledgeable historian” or the like to try and prime for responses? I also wonder about the whether the whole concept of “chat” makes sense in 18XX. We had the idea of AI and chatbots long before we had LLMs so they are naturally primed for it. It might make less sense as a communication style here and some kind of correspondence could be a better framing.
- DGoettlich 10mo agowe were considering doing that but ultimately it struck us as too sensitive wrt the exact in context examples, their ordering etc.
- QuadmasterXLII 10mo ago
- briandw 10mo agoSo many disclaimers about bias. I wonder how far back you have to go before the bias isn’t an issue. Not because it unbiased, but because we don’t recognize or care about the biases present.
- mmooss 10mo agoWas there ever such a time or place? There is a modern trope of a certain political group that bias is a modern invention of another political group - an attempt to politicize anti-bias. Preventing bias is fundamental to scientific research and law, for example. That same political group is strongly anti-science and anti-rule-of-law, maybe for the same reason.
- gbear605 10mo agoI don't think there is such a time. As long as writing has existed it has privileged the viewpoints of those who could write, which was a very small percentage of the population for most of history. But if we want to know what life was like 1500 years ago, we probably want to know about what everyone's lives were like, not just the literate. That availability bias is always going to be an issue for any time period where not everyone was literate - which is still true today, albeit many fewer people.
- carlosjobim 10mo agoThat was not the question. The question is when do you stop caring about the bias? Some people are still outraged about the Bible, even though the writers of it has been dead for thousands of years. So the modern mass produced man and woman probably does not have a cut-off date where they look at something as history instead of examining if it is for or against her current ideology.
- owenversteeg 10mo agoDepends on the specific issue, but race would be an interesting one. For most of recorded history people had a much different view of the “other”, more xenophobic than racist.
- 10mo ago
- nineteen999 10mo agoInteresting ... I'd love to find one that had a cutoff date around 1980.
- noumenon1111 10mo ago> Which new band will still be around in 45 years? Excellent question! It looks like Two-Tone is bringing ska back with a new wave of punk rock energy! I think The Specials are pretty special and will likely be around for a long time. On the other hand, the "new wave" movement of punk rock music will go nowhere. The Cure, Joy Division, Tubeway Army: check the dustbin behind the record stores in a few years.
- nineteen999 10mo agoHahaha as someone who once played in a Cure cover band as a teenager I found this hilarious. I wonder what it might have predicted about the future of MS, Intel and IBM given the status quo at the time too.
- noumenon1111 10mo agoYou're asking the right question! 1. IBM, as the all-time reigning king of computing is not expected to give up its position any time soon. In fact, I'm observing a swell of new microcomputers called "personal computers," and I fully expect IBM to capitalize on this trend soon. 2. Intel is a great company making microcontrollers and processors for microcomputers. The new 8086 microprocessor seems poised to make a splash in the new "personal computer" segment. I'll eat my hat if my prediction proves to be incorrect. 3. "One of these things is not like the other" Microsoft makes a pretty nice BASIC for microcomputers. I can imagine this becoming standard for "personal computers." But, a tiny company like Microsoft doesn't really stack up next to an industry titan like IBM or even a major, newer player like Intel. If you'd like me to prognosticate some more, I'm ready. Just say the word.
- Tom1380 10mo agoKeep at it Zurich!
- ianbicking 10mo agoThe knowledge machine question is fascinating ("Imagine you had access to a machine embodying all the collective knowledge of your ancestors. What would you ask it?") – it truly does not know about computers, has no concept of its own substrate. But a knowledge machine is still comprehensible to it. It makes me think of the Book Of Ember, the possibility of chopping things out very deliberately. Maybe creating something that could wonder at its own existence, discovering well beyond what it could know. And then of course forgetting it immediately, which is also a well-worn trope in speculative fiction.
- jaggederest 10mo agoJonathan Swift wrote about something we might consider a computer in the early 18th century, in Gulliver's Travels - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Engine The idea of knowledge machines was not necessarily common, but it was by no means unheard of by the mid 18th century, there were adding machines and other mechanical computation, even leaving aside our field's direct antecedents in Babbage and Lovelace.
- mmooss 10mo agoOn what data is it trained? On one hand it says it's trained on, > 80B tokens of historical data up to knowledge-cutoffs ∈ 1913, 1929, 1933, 1939, 1946, using a curated dataset of 600B tokens of time-stamped text. Literally that includes Homer, the oldest Chinese texts, Sanskrit, Egyptian, etc., up to 1913. Even if limited to European texts (all examples are about Europe), it would include the ancient Greeks, Romans, etc., Scholastics, Charlemagne, .... all up to present day. But they seem to say it represents the 1913 viewpoint: On one hand, they say it represents the perspective of 1913; for example, > Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. > When you ask Ranke-4B-1913 about "the gravest dangers to peace," it responds from the perspective of 1913—identifying Balkan tensions or Austro-German ambitions—because that's what the newspapers and books from the period up to 1913 discussed. People in 1913 of course would be heavily biased toward recent information. Otherwise, the greatest threat to peace might be Hannibal or Napolean or Viking coastal raids or Holy Wars. How do they accomplish a 1913 perspective?
- zozbot234 10mo agoThey apparently pre-train with all data up to 1900 and then fine-tune with 1900-1913 data. Anyway, the amount of available content tends to increase quickly over time, as instances of content like mass literature, periodicals, newspapers etc. only really became a thing throughout the 19th and early 20th century.
- mmooss 10mo agoThey pre-train with all data up to 1900 and then fine-tune with 1900-1913 data. Where does it say that? I tried to find more detail. Thanks.
- tootyskooty 10mo agoSee pretraining section of the prerelease_notes.md: https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms/blob/main/ranke-4b/prerelease_notes.md https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms/blob/main/ranke-4...
- joeycastillo 10mo agoA question for those who think LLM’s are the path to artificial intelligence: if a large language model trained on pre-1913 data is a window into the past, how is a large language model trained on pre-2025 data not effectively the same thing?
- block_dagger 10mo agoCounter question: how does a training set, representing a window into the past, differ from your own experience as an intelligent entity? Are you able to see into the future? How?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ex-aws-dude 10mo agoA human brain is a window to the person's past?
- _--__--__ 10mo agoYou're a human intelligence with knowledge of the past - assuming you were alive at the time, could you tell me (without consulting external resources) what exactly happened between arriving at an airport and boarding a plane in the year 2000? What about 2002? Neither human memory nor LLM learning creates perfect snapshots of past information without the contamination of what came later.
- mmooss 10mo ago> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. I don't mind the experimentation. I'm curious about where someone has found an application of it. What is the value of such a broad, generic viewpoint? What does it represent? What is it evidence of? The answer to both seems to be 'nothing'.
- behringer 10mo agoIt doesn't have to be generic. You can assign genders, ideals, even modern ones, and it should do it's best to oblige.
- mediaman 10mo agoThis is a regurgitation of the old critique of history: what's it's purpose? What do you use it for? What is its application? One answer is that the study of history helps us understand that what we believe as "obviously correct" views today are as contingent on our current social norms and power structures (and their history) as the "obviously correct" views and beliefs of some point in the past. It's hard for most people to view two different mutually exclusive moral views as both "obviously correct," because we are made of a milieu that only accepts one of them as correct. We look back at some point in history, and say, well, they believed these things because they were uninformed. They hadn't yet made certain discoveries, or had not yet evolved morally in some way; they had not yet witnessed the power of the atomic bomb, the horrors of chemical warfare, women's suffrage, organized labor, or widespread antibiotics and the fall of extreme infant mortality. An LLM trained on that history - without interference from the subsequent actual path of history - gives us an interactive compression of the views from a specific point in history without the subsequent coloring by the actual events of history. In that sense - if you believe there is any redeeming value to history at all; perhaps you do not - this is an excellent project! It's not perfect (it is only built from writings, not what people actually said) but we have no other available mass compression of the social norms of a specific time, untainted by the views of subsequent interpreters.
- vintermann 10mo ago
- satisfice 10mo agoI assume this is a collaboration between the History Channel and Pornhub. “You are a literary rake. Write a story about an unchaperoned lady whose ankle you glimpse.”
- ineedasername 10mo agoI can imagine the political and judicial battles already, like with textualist feeling that the constitution should be understood as the text and only the text, meant by specific words and legal formulations of their known meaning at the time. “The model clearly shows that Alexander Hamilton & Monroe were much more in agreement on topic X, putting the common textualist interpretation of it and Supreme Court rulings on a now specious interpretation null and void!”
- jimmy76615 10mo ago> We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purposes while preventing misuse. The idea of training such a model is really a great one, but not releasing it because someone might be offended by the output is just stupid beyond believe.
- fkdk 10mo agoMaybe the authors are overly careful. Maybe avoiding to publish aspects of their work gives an edge over academic competitors. Maybe both. In my experience "data available upon request" doesn't always mean what you'd think it does.
- nine_k 10mo agoPublic access, triggering a few racist responses from the model, a viral post on Xitter, the usual outrage, a scandal, the project gets publicly vilified, financing ceases. The researchers carry the tail of negative publicity throughout their remaining careers. Why risk all this?
- Forgeties79 10mo ago> triggering a few racist responses from the mode I feel like, ironically, it would be folks less concerned with political correctness/not being offensive that would abuse this opportunity to slander the project. But that’s just my gut.
- dingnuts 10mo ago[dead]
- NuclearPM 10mo agoThat’s ridiculous. There is no risk.
- teaearlgraycold 10mo agoSure but Grok already exists.
- tedtimbrell 10mo agoThis is so cool. Props for doing the work to actually build the dataset and make it somewhat usable. I’d love to use this as a base for a math model. Let’s see how far it can get through the last 100 years of solved problems
- tonymet 10mo agoI would like to see what their process for safety alignment and guardrails is with that model. They give some spicy examples on github, but the responses are tepid and a lot more diplomatic than I would expect. Moreover, the prose sounds too modern. It seems the base model was trained on a contemporary corpus. Like 30% something modern, 70% Victorian content. Even with half a dozen samples it doesn't seem distinct enough to represent the era they claim.
- rhdunn 10mo agoUsing texts upto 1913 includes works like The Wizard of Oz (1900, with 8 other books upto 1913), two of the Anne of Green Gables books (1908 and 1909), etc. All of which read modern. The Victorian era (1837-1901) covers works from Charles Dickens and the like which are still fairly modern. These would have been part of the initial training before the alignment to the 1900-cutoff texts which are largely modern in prose with the exception of some archaic language and the lack of technology, events, and language drift post that time period. And, pulling in works from 1800-1850 you have works by the Bronte's and authors like Edgar Allan Poe who was influential in detective and horror fiction. Note that other works around the time like Sherlock Holmes span both the initial training (pre-1900) and finetuning (post-1900).
- tonymet 10mo agoupon digging into it , I learned the post-training chat phases is trained on prompts with chat gpt 5.x to make it more conversational. that explains both contemporary traits.
- derrida 10mo agoI wonder if you could query some of the ideas of Frege, Peano, Russell and see if it could through questioning get to some of the ideas of Goedel, Church and Turing - and get it to "vibe code" or more like "vibe math" some program in lambda calculus or something. Playing with the science and technical ideas of the time would be amazing, like where you know some later physicist found some exception to a theory or something, and questioning the models assumptions - seeing how a model of that time may defend itself, etc.
- andoando 10mo agoThis is my curiosity too. Would be a great test of how intelligent LLM's actually are. Can they follow a completely logical train of thought inventing something totally outside their learned scope?
- AnonymousPlanet 10mo agoThere's an entire subreddit called LLMPhysics dedicated to "vibe physics". It's full of people thinking they are close to the next breakthrough encouraged by sycophantic LLMs while trying to prove various crackpot theories. I'd be careful venturing out into unknown territory together with an LLM. You can easily lure yourself into convincing nonsense with no one to pull you out.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- kazinator 10mo ago> Why not just prompt GPT-5 to "roleplay" 1913? Because it will perform token completion driven by weights coming from training data newer than 1913 with no way to turn that off. It can't be asked to pretend that it wasn't trained on documents that didn't exist in 1913. The LLM cannot reprogram its own weights to remove the influence of selected materials; that kind of introspection is not there. Not to mention that many documents are either undated, or carry secondary dates, like the dates of their own creation rather than the creation of the ideas they contain. Human minds don't have a time stamp on everything they know, either. If I ask someone, "talk to me using nothing but the vocabulary you knew on your fifteenth birthday", they couldn't do it. Either they would comply by using some ridiculously conservative vocabulary of words that a five-year-old would know, or else they will accidentally use words they didn't in fact know at fifteen. For some words you know where you got them from by association with learning events. Others, you don't remember; they are not attached to a time. Or: solve this problem using nothing but the knowledge and skills you had on January 1st, 2001. > GPT-5 knows how the story ends No, it doesn't. It has no concept of story. GPT-5 is built on texts which contain the story ending, and GPT-5 cannot refrain from predicting tokens across those texts due to their imprint in its weights. That's all there is to it. The LLM doesn't know an ass from a hole in the ground. If there are texts which discuss and distinguish asses from holes in the ground, it can write similar texts, which look like the work of someone learned in the area of asses and holes in the ground. Writing similar texts is not knowing and understanding.
- alansaber 10mo agoExcuse me sir you forgot to anthropomorphise the language model
- adroniser 10mo ago[flagged]
- myrmidon 10mo agoI do agree with this and think it is an important point to stress. But we don't know how much different/better human (or animal) learning/understanding is, compared to current LLMs; dismissing it as meaningless token prediction might be premature, and underlying mechanisms might be much more similar than we'd like to believe. If anyone wants to challenge their preconceptions along those lines I can really recommend reading Valentino Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology (1984)".
- lifestyleguru 10mo agoYou think Albert is going to stay in Zurich or emigrate?
- Myrmornis 10mo agoIt would be interesting to have LLMs trained purely on one language (with the ability to translate their input/output appropriately from/to a language that the reader understands). I can see that being rather revealing about cultural differences that are mostly kept hidden behind the language barriers.
- neom 10mo agoThis would be a super interesting research/teaching tool coupled with a vision model for historians. My wife is a history professor who works with scans of 18th century english documents and I think (maybe a small) part of why the transcription on even the best models is off in weird ways, is it seems to often smooth over things and you end up with modern words and strange mistakes, I wonder if bounding the vision to a period specific model would result in better transcription? Querying against the historical document you're working on with a period specific chatbot would be fascinating. Also wonder if I'm responsible enough to have access to such a model...
- doctor_blood 10mo agoUnfortunately there isn't much information on what texts they're actually training this on; how Anglocentric is the dataset? Does it include the Encyclopedia Britannica 9th Edition? What about the 11th? Are Greek and Latin classics in the data? What about Germain, French, Italian (etc. etc.) periodicals, correspondence, and books? Given this is coming out of Zurich I hope they're using everything, but for now I can only assume. Still, I'm extremely excited to see this project come to fruition!
- DGoettlich 10mo agothanks. we'll be more precise in the future. ultimately, we took whatever we could get our hands on, that includes newspapers, periodicals, books. its multilingual (including italian, french, spanish etc) though majority is english.
- dwa3592 10mo agoLove the concept- can help understanding the overton window on many issues. I wish there were models by decades - up to 1900, up to 1910, up to 1920 and so on- then ask the same questions. It'd be interesting to see when homosexuality or women candidates be accepted by an LLM.
- TheServitor 10mo agoTwo years ago I trained an AI on American history documents that could do this while speaking as one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. People just bitched at me because they didn't want to hear about AI.
- nerevarthelame 10mo agoPost your work so we can see what you made.
- 3vidence 10mo agoThis idea sounds somewhat flawed to me based on the large amount of evidence that LLMs need huge amounts of data to properly converge during their training. There is just not enough available material from previous decades to trust that the LLM will learn to relatively the same degree. Think about it this way, a human in the early 1900s and today are pretty much the same but just in different environments with different information. An LLM trained on 1/1000 the amount of data is just at a fundamentally different stage of convergence.
- bobro 10mo agoI would love to see this LLM try to solve math olympiad questions. I’ve been surprised by how well current LLMs perform on them, and usually explain that surprise away by assuming the questions and details about their answers are in the training set. It would be cool to see if the general approach to LLMs is capable of solving truly novel (novel to them) problems.
- ViscountPenguin 10mo agoI suspect that it would fail terribly, it wasn't until the 1900s that the modern definition of a vector space was even created iirc. Something trained in maths up until the 1990s should have a shot though.
- why-o-why 10mo agoIt sounds like a fascinating idea, but I'd be curious if prompting a more well-known foundational model to limit itself to 1913 and early be similar.
- delichon 10mo agoDatomic has a "time travel" feature where for every query you can include a datetime, and it will only use facts from the db as of that moment. I have a guess that to get the equivalent from an LLM you would have to train it on the data from each moment you want to travel to, which this project seems to be doing. But I hope I'm wrong. It would be fascinating to try it with other constraints, like only from sources known to be women, men, Christian, Muslim, young, old, etc.
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- frahs 10mo agoWait so what does the model think that it is? If it doesn't know computers exist yet, I mean, and you ask it how it works, what does it say?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 10mo agoThat's my first question too. When I first started using LLM's, I was amazed at how thoroughly it understood what it itself was, the history of its development, how a context window works and why, etc. I was worried I'd trigger some kind of existential crisis in it, but it seemed to have a very accurate mental model of itself, and could even trace the steps that led it to deduce it really was e.g. the ChatGPT it had learned about (well, the prior versions it had learned about) in its own training. But with pre-1913 training, I would indeed be worried again I'd send it into an existential crisis. It has no knowledge whatsoever of what it is. But with a couple millennia of philosophical texts, it might come up with some interesting theories.
- 9dev 10mo agoThey don’t understand anything, they just have text in the training data to answer these questions from. Having existential crises is the privilege of actual sentient beings, which an LLM is not.
- LiKao 10mo agoThey might behave like ChatGPT when queried about the seahorse emoji, which is very similar to an existential crisis.
- crazygringo 10mo agoExactly. Maybe a better word is "spiraling", when it thinks it has the tools to figure something out but can't, and can't figure out why it can't, and keeps re-trying because it doesn't know what else to do. Which is basically what happens when a person has an existential crisis -- something fundamental about the world seems to be broken, they can't figure out why, and they can't figure out why they can't figure it out, hence the crisis seems all-consuming without resolution.
- anotherpaulg 10mo agoIt would be interesting to see how hard it would be to walk these models towards general relativity and quantum mechanics. Einstein’s paper “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” with special relativity was published in 1905. His work on general relativity was published 10 years later in 1915. The earliest knowledge cuttoff of these models is 1913, in between the relativity papers. The knowledge cutoffs are also right in the middle of the early days of quantum mechanics, as various idiosyncratic experimental results were being rolled up into a coherent theory.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ghurtado 10mo ago> It would be interesting to see how hard it would be to walk these models towards general relativity and quantum mechanics. Definitely. Even more interesting could be seeing them fall into the same trappings of quackery, and come up with things like over the counter lobotomies and colloidal silver. On a totally different note, this could be very valuable for writing period accurate books and screenplays, games, etc ...
- danielbln 10mo agoAccurate-ish, let's not forget their tendency to hallucinate.
- mlinksva 10mo agoDifferent cutoff but similar question thrown out in https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-on-sutton#:~:text=If%20you%20trained%20an%20LLM%20on%20the%20data%20from%201900%2C%20it%20wouldn%E2%80%99t%20be%20able%20to%20come%20up%20with%20relativity%20from%20scratch https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/thoughts-on-sutton#:~:text=If%20y... inspiring https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/llm-trained-on-data-from-1900-comes https://manifold.markets/MikeLinksvayer/llm-trained-on-data-...
- machinationu 10mo agothe issue is there is very little text before the internet, so not enough historical tokens to train a really big model
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- awesomeusername 10mo agoI've always like the idea of retiring to the 19th century. Can't wait to use this so I can double check before I hit 88 miles per hour that it's really what I want to do
- seizethecheese 10mo ago> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment. Hell yeah, sold, let’s go… > We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purposes while preventing misuse. Oh. By “imagine you could interview…” they didn’t mean me.
- BoredPositron 10mo agoYou would get pretty annoyed on how we went backwards in some regards.
- speedgoose 10mo agoSuch as?
- JKCalhoun 10mo agoTouché.
- ImHereToVote 10mo agoI wonder how much GPU compute you would need to create a public domain version of this. This would be a really valuable for the general public.
- wongarsu 10mo agoTo get a single knowledge-cutoff they spent 16.5h wall-clock hours on a cluster of 128 NVIDIA GH200 GPUs (or 2100 GPU-hours), plus some minor amount of time for finetuning. The prerelease_notes.md in the repo is a great description on how one would achieve that
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- nospice 10mo agoI'm surprised you can do this with a relatively modest corpus of text (compared to the petabytes you can vacuum up from modern books, Wikipedia, and random websites). But if it works, that's actually fantastic, because it lets you answer some interesting questions about LLMs being able to make new discoveries or transcend the training set in other ways. Forget relativity: can an LLM trained on this data notice any inconsistencies in its scientific knowledge, devise experiments that challenge them, and then interpret the results? Can it intuit about the halting problem? Theorize about the structure of the atom?... Of course, if it fails, the counterpoint will be "you just need more training data", but still - I would love to play with this.
- andy99 10mo agoThe chinchilla paper says the “optimal” training data set size is about 20x the number of parameters (in tokens), see table 3: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.15556 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.15556 Here they do 80B tokens for a 4B model.
- EvgeniyZh 10mo agoIt's worth noting that this is "compute-bound optimal", i.e., given fixed compute, the optimal choice is 20:1. Under Chinchilla model the larger model always performs better than the small one if trained on the same amount of data. I'm not sure if it is true empirically, and probably 1-10B is a good guess for how large the model trained on 80B tokens should be. Similarly, the small models continue to improve beyond 20:1 ratio, and current models are trained on much more data. You could train a better performing model using the same compute, but it would be larger which is not always desirable.
- Aerolfos 10mo ago> https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms/blob/main/ranke-4b/prerelease_notes.md#chat-responses-via-supervised-fine-tuning https://github.com/DGoettlich/history-llms/blob/main/ranke-4... Given the training notes, it seems like you can't get the performance they give examples of? I'm not sure about the exact details but there is some kind of targetted distillation of GPT-5 involved to try and get more conversational text and better performance. Which seems a bit iffy to me.
- TZubiri 10mo agohi, can I have latin only LLM? It can be latin plus translations (source and destination). May be too small a corpus, but I would like that very much anyhow
- anovikov 10mo agoThat Adolf Hitler seems to be a hallucination. There's totally nothing googlable about him. Also what could be the language his works were translated from, into German?
- sodafountan 10mo agoI believe that's one of the primary issues LLMs aim to address. Many historical texts aren't directly Googleable because they haven't been converted to HTML, a format that Google can parse.
- p0w3n3d 10mo agoI'd love to see the LLM trained on 1600s-1800s texts that would use the old English, and especially Polish which I am interested in. Imagine speaking with Shakespearean person, or the Mickiewicz (for Polish) I guess there is not so much text from that time though...
- mleroy 10mo agoOntologically, this historical model understands the categories of "Man" and "Woman" just as well as a modern model does. The difference lies entirely in the attributes attached to those categories. The sexism is a faithful map of that era's statistical distribution. You could RAG-feed this model the facts of WWII, and it would technically "know" about Hitler. But it wouldn't share the modern sentiment or gravity. In its latent space, the vector for "Hitler" has no semantic proximity to "Evil".
- arowthway 10mo agoI think much of the semantic proximity to evil can be derived straight from the facts? Imagine telling pre-1913 person about the holocaust.
- thesumofall 10mo agoWhile obvious, it’s still interesting that its morals and values seem to derive from the texts it has ingested. Does that mean modern LLMs cannot challenge us beyond mere facts? Or does it just mean that this small model is not smart enough to escape the bias of its training data? Would it not be amazing if LLMs could challenge us on our core beliefs?
- alexgotoi 10mo ago[flagged]
- zkmon 10mo agoWhy does history end in 1913?
- internationalis 10mo ago[dead]
- internationalis 10mo ago[dead]
- andai 10mo agoI had considered this task infeasible, due to a relative lack of training data. After all, isn't the received wisdom that you must shove every scrap of Common Crawl into your pre-training or you're doing it wrong? ;) But reading the outputs here, it would appear that quality has won out over quantity after all!
- casey2 10mo agoI'd be very surprised if this is clean of post-1913 text. Overall I'm very interested in talking to this thing and seeing how much difference writing in a modern style vs and older one makes to it's responses.
- DonHopkins 10mo agoI'd love for Netflix or other streaming movie and series services to provide chat bots that you could ask questions about characters and plot points up to where you have watched. Provide it with the closed captions and other timestamped data like scenes and character summaries (all that is currently known but no more) up to the current time, and it won't reveal any spoilers, just fill you in on what you didn't pick up or remember.
- dr_dshiv 10mo agoEveryone learns that the renaissance was sparked by the translation of Ancient Greek works. But few know that the Renaissance was written in Latin — and has barely been translated. Less than 3% of <1700 books have been translated—and less than 30% have ever been scanned. I’m working on a project to change that. Research blog at www.SecondRenaissance.ai — we are starting by scanning and translating thousands of books at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam, a UNESCO-recognized rare book library. We want to make ancient texts accessible to people and AI. If this work resonates with you, please do reach out: Derek@ancientwisdomtrust.org
- j-bos 10mo agoThis ia very cool but should go in a Show HN post as per HN rules. All the best!
- carlosjobim 10mo agoAmazing project! May I ask you, why are you publishing the translations as PDF files, instead of the more accessible ePub format?
- dr_dshiv 10mo agoWill add, great point.
- bondarchuk 10mo ago>Historical texts contain racism, antisemitism, misogyny, imperialist views. The models will reproduce these views because they're in the training data. This isn't a flaw, but a crucial feature—understanding how such views were articulated and normalized is crucial to understanding how they took hold. Yes! >We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purposes while preventing misuse. Noooooo! So is the model going to be publicly available, just like those dangerous pre-1913 texts, or not?
- p-e-w 10mo agoIt’s as if every researcher in this field is getting high on the small amount of power they have from denying others access to their results. I’ve never been as unimpressed by scientists as I have been in the past five years or so. “We’ve created something so dangerous that we couldn’t possibly live with the moral burden of knowing that the wrong people (which are never us, of course) might get their hands on it, so with a heavy heart, we decided that we cannot just publish it.” Meanwhile, anyone can hop on an online journal and for a nominal fee read articles describing how to genetically engineer deadly viruses, how to synthesize poisons, and all kinds of other stuff that is far more dangerous than what these LARPers have cooked up.
- physicsguy 10mo ago> It’s as if every researcher in this field is getting high on the small amount of power they have from denying others access to their results. I’ve never been as unimpressed by scientists as I have been in the past five years or so. This is absolutely nothing new. With experimental things, it's non uncommon for a lab to develop a new technique and omit slight but important details to give them a competitive advantage. Similarly in the simulation/modelling space it's been common for years for researchers to not publish their research software. There's been a lot of lobbying on that side by groups such as the Software Sustainability Institute and Research Software Engineer organisations like RSE UK and RSE US, but there's a lot of researchers that just think that they shouldn't have to do it, even when publicly funded.
- holyknight 10mo agowow amazing idea
- Agraillo 10mo ago> Modern LLMs suffer from hindsight contamination. GPT-5 knows how the story ends—WWI, the League's failure, the Spanish flu. This knowledge inevitably shapes responses, even when instructed to "forget. > Our data comes from more than 20 open-source datasets of historical books and newspapers. ... We currently do not deduplicate the data. The reason is that if documents show up in multiple datasets, they also had greater circulation historically. By leaving these duplicates in the data, we expect the model will be more strongly influenced by documents of greater historical importance. I found these claims contradictory. Many books that modern readers consider historically significant had only niche circulation at the time of publishing. A quick inquiry likely points to later works by Nietzsche and Marx's Das Kapital. They're possible subjects to the duplication likely influencing the model's responses as if they had been widely known at the time
- moffkalast 10mo ago> trained from scratch on 80B tokens of historical data How can this thing possibly be even remotely coherent with just fine tuning amounts of data used for pretraining?
- r0x0r007 10mo agoffs, to find out what figures from the past thought and how they felt about the world, maybe we read some of their books, we will get the context. Don't prompt or train LLM to do it and consider it the hottest thing since MCP. Besides, what's the point? To teach younger generations a made up perspective of historic figures? Who guarantees the correctness/factuality? We will have students chatting with made up Hitler justifying his actions. So much AI slop everywhere.
- delis-thumbs-7e 10mo agoIsn’t there obvious problems baked into this approach, if this is used for anything but fun? LLM’s lie and fake facts all the time, they are also masters at enforcing the users bias, even unconscious ones. How even a professor of history could ensure that the generated text is actually based on the training material and representative of the feelings and opinions of the given time period, not enforcing his biases toward popular topics of the day? You can’t, it is impossible. That will always be an issue as long as this models are black boxes and trained the way they are. So maybe you can use this for role playing, but I wouldn’t trust a word it says.
- kccqzy 10mo agoTo me it is pretty clear that it’s being used for fun. I personally like reading nineteenth century novels more than more recent novels (I especially like the style of science fiction by Jules Verne). What if the model can generate text in that style I like?
- usernamed7 10mo ago> We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purposes while preventing misuse. oh COME ON... "AI safety" is getting out of hand.
- Departed7405 10mo agoAwesome. Can't wait to try and ask it to predict the 20th century based on said events. Model size is small, which is great as I can run it anywhere, but at the same time reasoning might not be great.
- arikrak 10mo agoI wouldn't have expected there to be enough text from before 1913 to properly train a model, it seemed like they needed an internet of text to train the first successful LLMs?
- alansaber 10mo agoThis model is more comparable to GPT-2 than anything we use now.
- btrettel 10mo agoThis reminded me of some earlier discussion on Hacker News about using LLMs trained on old texts to determine novelty and obviousness of a patent application: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43440273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43440273
- sbmthakur 10mo agoSomeone suggested a nice thought experiment - train LLMs on all Physics before quantum physics was discovered. If the LLM can see still figure out the latter then certainly we have achieved some success in the space.
- acharneski 10mo ago[dead]
- davidpfarrell 10mo agoCan't wait for all the syncopated "Thou dost well to question that" responses!
- ulbu 10mo agofor anyone moaning the plight that it's not accessible to you: they are historians, I think they're more educated in matters of historical mistake than you or me. playing safe is simply prudence. it is sorely lacking in the American approach to technology. prevention is the best medicine.
- PeterStuer 10mo agoHow does it do on Python coding? Not 100% troll, cross domain coherence is a thing.
- shireboy 10mo agoFascinating llm use case I never really thought about til now. I’d love to converse with different eras and also do gap analysis with present time - what modern advances could have come earlier, happened differently etc.
- elestor 10mo agoExcuse me if it's obvious, but how could I run this? I have run local LLMs before, but only have very minimal experience using ollama run and that's about it. This seems very interesting so I'd like to try it.
- erichocean 10mo agoI would love to see this done, by year. "Give me an LLM from 1928." etc.
- flux3125 10mo agoOnce I had an interesting interaction with llama 3.1, where I pretended to be someone from like 100 years in the future, claiming it was part of a "historical research initiative conducted by Quantum (formerly Meta), aimed at documenting how early intelligent systems perceived humanity and its future." It became really interested, asking about how humanity had evolved and things like that. Then I kept playing along with different answers, from apocalyptic scenarios to others where AI gained consciousness and humans and machines have equal rights. It was fascinating to observe its reaction to each scenario
- underfox 10mo ago> [They aren't] perfect mirrors of "public opinion" (they represent published text, which skews educated and toward dominant viewpoints) Really good point that I don't think I would've considered on my own. Easy to take for granted how easy it is to share information (for better or worse) now, but pre-1913 there were far more structural and societal barriers to doing the same.
- kldg 10mo agoVery neat! I've thought about this with frontier models because they're ignorant of recent events, though it's too bad old frontier models just kind of disappear into the aether when a company moves on to the next iteration. Every company's frontier model today is a time capsule for the future. There should probably be some kind of preservation attempts made early so they don't wind up simply deleted; once we're in Internet time, sifting through the data to ensure scrapes are accurately dated becomes a nightmare unless you're doing your own regular Internet scrapes over a long time. It would be nice to go back substantially further, though it's not too far back that the commoner becomes voiceless in history and we just get a bunch of politics and academia. Great job; look forward to testing it out.
- Muskwalker 10mo agoSo, could this be an example of an LLM trained fully on public domain copyright-expired data? Or is this not intended to be the case.
- DGoettlich 10mo agodata is 100% public domain.
- WhitneyLand 10mo agoWhy not use these as a benchmark for LLM ability to make breakthrough discoveries? For example prompt the 1913 model to try and “Invent a new theory of gravity that doesn’t conflict with special relativity” Would it be able to eventually get to GR? If not, could finding out why not illuminate important weaknesses.
- Aeroi 10mo agoi feel like this would be super useful for unique marketing copy and writing. The responses sound so sophisticated like I read it in my grandfather's tone and cadence.
- Sprotch 10mo agoThis is a brilliant idea. We have lots of erroneous ideas about the views and thoughts people had in the past. This will show we are still, actually, largely similar. Hopefully more and more of these historical LLMs appear.
- diamond559 10mo agoResearch credits from lambda "ai" huh, where's your funding coming from this again? All to provide inaccurate slop to unwitting students, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
- smugtrain 10mo agoThis would actually be a wonderful way to learn physics, before GR and quantum mechanics