Isn't it surprising that there were enough pre-1930 tokens to train an intelligent model? I was always under the impression that many tokens are also necessary

Isn't it surprising that there were enough pre-1930 tokens to train an intelligent model? I was always under the impression that many tokens are also necessary to force the model to grok things and compress its learning into a somewhat intelligent model of the world, so to say. But perhaps I'm underestimating how much digitized literature exists from then.