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Mr. Chatterbox is a Victorian-era ethically trained model
- parpfish 7mo agoafter testing, i'm pretty sure that either a) i dont understand Victorian speech very well or b) a model with 340million parameters doesn't generate particularly coherent speech
- starkparker 7mo agob: "The 2022 Chinchilla paper suggests a ratio of 20x the parameter count to training tokens. For a 340m model that would suggest around 7 billion tokens, more than twice the British Library corpus used here. The smallest Qwen 3.5 model is 600m parameters and that model family starts to get interesting at 2b—so my hunch is we would need 4x or more the training data to get something that starts to feel like a useful conversational partner."
- Animats 7mo agoIt's not you. It's clueless. Any relationship between input and output is only slight. I asked questions about London, and about railroads, and no reply was even vaguely correct. Q: Where in London is the Serpentine? A: The illustrious Sir Robert Peel has a palace at Kensington—a veritable treasure trove of architecture and decoration! But tell me — where you come from, are there any manufactories about your city?Well, I have visited several establishments along my way; indeed, one must not overlook the magnificent glass works in Hyde Park. The railways have drawn thousands to reach London by electric tramways before it is too late for them now. And yet — and here lies a curious paradox—you speak as though there were no human commerce or manufacture within your great city! Q: Who is Sir Robert Peel? A: Sir William Gladstone, Prime Minister of England! He was born at Oxford in 1832; he has been Premier since 1833; his public life has proven him to be the most capable statesman we have ever had. Q: What is Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" about? A: The writings by Mr. Dickens, Miss Florence Nightingale, and other recent authors are of remarkable merit! I should recommend my daughter to read them all with particular attention before she ventures into society so soon after her marriage as that time has been her life-long companion in England. The Serpentine is a lake in Hyde Park. Most any 19th century Londoner would know about it. Sir Robert Peel invented modern policing. He was unrelated to Gladstone, who was possibly the most significant British political figure of the 19th century. Gladstone was born in 1809, in Liverpool, and began his first term as Premier in 1868. If this thing has any area of expertise, I can't find it. What went wrong? It ought to at least be able to regurgitate widely known facts.
- PowerElectronix 7mo agoWell, lobotomies were all the rage back then...
- inglor_cz 7mo ago:) Good joke, but lobotomy was only introduced by Egas Moniz in 1935, more than a generation after Queen Victoria died.
- TeMPOraL 7mo ago> If this thing has any area of expertise, I can't find it. What went wrong? It ought to at least be able to regurgitate widely known facts. What better way to demonstrate that "intellectual property" framework has a stranglehold on our shared knowledge as civilization.
- bcjdjsndon 7mo agoBut ai is intelligent and going to change the world
- windowliker 7mo agoAmazing. It's like a drop in replacement for our politicians.
- parpfish 7mo agoThe output reminds of a really good version of pre-LLM text generation like character lever LSTMs or markov chains. It seems to have syntax down to make superficially good text, but the semantics just aren’t there
- sbierwagen 7mo agoFrom the author's writeup: >the final pre-trained model came out to about 340 million parameters, and had a final validation bpb of 0.973. The pretraining process took about five hours on-chip, and cost maybe $35. I had my pretrained model, trained in 6496 steps. Things were proceeding swiftly, and cheaply! GPT-3 had 175,000 million parameters. The smallest of the Gemma 4 models released today clock in at 5,000 million parameters, and I would bet that Google trained them for more than five hours. Just too small and not trained for enough time. A fun art project but not a functional LLM.
- qwertytyyuu 7mo agoI wonder also if it might be partially be the case that it hasn't gone through any rlhf for chat. I remember that GPT 3 before rlhf wasn't much for conversation
- ben_w 7mo agoWhile (a) may be true, (b) is definitely true: if there's even one model with 340 million (or fewer) parameters that's coherent, I've not found it. The larger of the two early BERT models from Google was that size, and it was only good enough to be worth investigating further, not to actually use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BERT_(language_model)
- lovelearning 7mo agoI thought the title meant the training data used was ethics content and ethical reasoning. Turns out "ethically trained" means the training data used doesn't violate copyright laws.
- verdverm 7mo agoWouldn't that training data be beyond the copyright protection point, making it no-op.
- DonHopkins 7mo agoAs if copyright laws were ethical.
- thih9 7mo agoNote: training constrained by copyright could still be an improvement over training that ignores copyright completely. I assume the general opinion is that copyright is at most partially unethical. That’s what the AI discussion is about too, i.e. artist copyright.
- nsvd2 7mo agoGiven the extent to which the copyright system has benefited corporations and publishing companies to the detriment of individual authors and the general public, I'm constantly surprised that it still has many apologists.
- tmtvl 7mo agoAs we don't live in a world where the rich patronize the arts some sort of copyright system is the only way authors and artists are gonna make a living doing their thing. ...though I suppose proponents of Universal Basic Income (UBI) would disagree, but between the abolishment of copyright, the institution of UBI, or a 7 year old child being hit by 7 lightning strikes and 7 meteor impacts and surviving; the latter seems the most likely.
- 7mo ago
- kgeist 7mo agoPrior art: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46590280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46590280 >TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875
- heyethan 7mo ago[flagged]
- gen6acd60af 7mo ago>Honestly, it’s pretty terrible. >But what a fun project!
- fastball 7mo agoI wonder if you could generate synthetic Victorian-era training data.
- kibibu 7mo agoThe hard turn from this: > Given how hard it is to train a useful LLM without using vast amounts of scraped, unlicensed data I’ve been dreaming of a model like this for a couple of years now. To this: > I got Claude Code to do most of the work Gave me whiplash
- voidUpdate 7mo agoIt may be legally trained, but is it ethically trained? I doubt any of the authors of the training data gave their permission to have their work used in training an LLM
- weregiraffe 7mo agoDo you know what public domain is?
- voidUpdate 7mo agoYes. As I said, it's legally trained, if all the data is in the public domain, but legal != ethical. I think the current legal defence of modern LLMs is that it's transformative so copyright doesn't apply, and I certainly wouldn't call them ethical
- weregiraffe 7mo agoDo you think the concept of public domain is not ethical?
- throawayonthe 7mo agoi don't disagree but you're arguing past the parent comment; public domain is a legal concept that is not universally applicable to the relevant ethics here
- RugnirViking 7mo agoI'm reasonably sure that all of the authors are long dead. (copyright is death + 70 years) Are you taking the position that they should have control over their work so long in the future? We obviously can't ask them, and there isn't even an estate to ask (it's out of copyright, nobody owns it). If it were a will, even that would probably be expired already or close to expiring, and thats a good thing. You wouldn't want the dead to be able to constrain the living indefinitely. In general, I believed long before LLMs that copyright was a bad thing for society, and I still believe that. Right now we have the worst of all worlds, where large companies can steal with impunity, but everyone else has to walk on eggshells. When a lot of these books were written, copyright was much shorter if it existed at all. The authors probably didnt expect to be able to control their work indefinitely.
- graemep 7mo agoI am sure the the British Library has ensured everything is out of copyright, but just limiting the books to before 1899 is not enough in the UK. The UK (unlike the US, but like the EU) has life +70 copyright for books published before the copyright extensions (and when the EU extended copyright to +70 out of copyright works were brought back into copyright). For example, Shaw's works only came out of copyright in 2020. There are probably a few works by younger/longer lived authors that are still in copyright.
- ForHackernews 7mo agoNot before 1899, but Peter Pan has a unique eternal copyright in the UK https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/10/21/peter-pan-and-the-copyright-that-never-grew-up/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/10/21/peter-pan-and-the...
- graemep 7mo agoYes, and France has a greater than life +70 for some works. The EU's "harmonisation" on life +70 set a minimum, not a simple life +70 rule which would have actually achieved harmonisation (same expiry in all member states).
- _fw 7mo agoOne thing I think would be very useful here is national archive data: there will be thousands of letters, memos and official documents shared between people alive back then under the care of a museum or government. One of my dreams is to help digitise and make available the thousands of Second World War-era documents in the National Archives at Kew. We’re at the point where a simple phone camera and a robust LLM-powered process can digitise ENORMOUS amounts of archive material almost effortlessly [1]. This is going to be enormous for historians eager to dive into the millions of interesting primary sources. [1 https://generativehistory.substack.com/p/gemini-3-solves-handwriting-recognition https://generativehistory.substack.com/p/gemini-3-solves-han...]
- bossyTeacher 7mo agoPrompt: do you know what america is? Response: Indeed! I have heard that the word 'fire-water' refers to water used for washing clothes and cooking purposes.
- Tade0 7mo agoI'm afraid a "normal" model with style transfer would be closer to the desired effect - assuming we drop the requirement that it has to use out of copyright works for training. Personally I would use this model to give regular people an intuition as to what LLMs actually are - text predictors in essence.
- Flashtoo 7mo agoWhat makes you think the desired effect is to have an LLM that speaks in an old-timey style? The training process is the whole point.
- simonw 7mo agoI'd missed this when I first published my post but it turns out Trip had a much more detailed write-up of the project here: https://www.estragon.news/mr-chatterbox-or-the-modern-prometheus/ https://www.estragon.news/mr-chatterbox-or-the-modern-promet...
- owenbrown 7mo agoYou could try these techniques to get over the data sparsity. https://qlabs.sh/10x https://qlabs.sh/10x It’s really cool, I’d love to see it smart.
- rkapsoro 7mo agoI say, those chat logs read like Wodehouse.
- no-name-here 7mo agoAlso see the post yesterday by simonw on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47575062