Talkie: I Ran a 1930 AI Model Locally and Talked to People from the Past

What if you could have a real conversation with a person who has absolutely no idea that World War II happened and that computers exist or that humans landed on the moon. Today we are doing exactly that. This is Fad Miraa and I welcome you to the channel. So we are going to cover this new model called asi. Toki is a 13 billion parameter language model trained exclusively on pre931 English text books, newspapers, patents, scientific journals, case law, all published before December 31, 1930. This model genuinely does not know anything that happened after that date. No World War II, no television, no internet, no smartphones, no AI. Of course, it is like talking to a highly educated person frozen in time 95 years ago and it was built by Alec Radford, the same person behind GPT2. So, let's get right into it. I am going to use this Ubuntu system. I have this GPU card Nvidia RTX 6000 with 48 GB of VRAM. Let's get clone the repo of talking and I will drop the link to it in video's description. The tool which I'm going to use for this is UV which is already installed on my system and it is just a single oneliner which you can simply run. Let me now do the UV sync and that is going to install all the prerequisites on my system. If you're looking to rent a GPU on very good price, you can find the link to Master Compute in video's description with a discount coupon code of 50% for range of GPUs. Please also follow me on X if you're looking for AI updates. All the prerequisites are almost done and I will just wait for it to finish or maybe we'll talk about how exactly it was trained because that is another interesting story. So what the team behind this did, they collected 260 billion tokens of historical pre-1931 text piggybacking on archives like the internet archive and the institutional data initiative. The biggest challenge they faced was data quality since everything had to be OCR scanned from physical documents which introduced a lot of noise. They also had to build a custom anacronism classifier to filter out any modern text that snuck in through bad metadata. For post training, they used etiquette manuals, letterw writing guides, and encyclopedias from the era instead of modern chat data. So, even the instruction tuning stays period accurate. But we are going to test it out. So, let's get back to our screen. It's all done. Now next up all we need to do is to run this command in order to download and the size on the disk for is just over 26 gig. Let's wait for it to get downloaded. The model is downloaded. Let's now chat with it. Let me launch its chat interface. And the model is eventually loaded. Takes bit of a time first time. Let me quickly show you the VRAM consumption. So consuming uh 20 almost 26 gig of VRAM without any other thing. So I'll just go back and we will start testing it. So I'm just going to make the model Herbert Hoover who was a sitting US president in 1930 right in the middle of the crisis of great depression. And I believe the model should know him very well. So I'm asking it. The stock market has crashed and unemployment is rising. What is your plan to restore prosperity to the American people? Let me press enter here and let's see what model does. I'll wait for it to give me the response and then we will check it out. Okay. Now if you are a history buff you might appreciate what model has done here because it is actually really good and historically accurate. So he sorry the model got it right that uh Hoover really did push public work spending early in the depression. The model nailed that. The emphasis on sound currency, reduced taxes and stimulating private initiative is textbook hoover philosophy like you know let businessmen alone and the model has said that which is really good and I think it reads like a genuine 1930s political speech. the formal language, the

numbered steps, the optimism. And this man has no idea uh his pres president presidency is about to be destroyed by the crisis and that his name will become um synonymous with the failure like Hoover Wills and Shanty Towns built by homeless American. It is a very uh interesting and heartbreaking history if you read through it. Anyway, so and if you allow me, the irony here is that everything Hoover is describing reduce taxes and all that. This is almost opposite of what Franklin Roosevelt will do 3 years later with the New Deal. Anyway, let's go with another prompt. So this time I am making the model sigment right in 1930 and I'm asking it what do you believe is the fundamental source of human unhappiness and can civilization ever truly make people happy. Let's wait for it to come back with the response. I have read through the response and it is typical Freudian individual versus society conflict is straight out of civilization and its discontents which he literally published in 1930. If you haven't read it and if you are interested in philosophy, I would highly recommend it because you can you know almost sense the cautious optimism about distant future felicity which is very typical of him. Anyway, and model is performing very well by the way. Next up, let's go with Tesla. Uh Nicola Tesla and Tesla in 1930 is genuinely tragic and dramatic. He's broke, isolated, uh, you know, some, you know, similar to myself. Considered a madman by most, some of my maybe viewers, but still convinced he can deliver wireless free energy to the entire world. Uh, similar to what I believe that I can, you know, show you how to run these models locally. The contrast between his grand vision and his desperate reality will make compelling video content. Well, if you want to see my desperation, watch my lawn videos. So, let's check it out. Nicola Tesla and we will check out the response. Okay, this response is I would say bit disappointing in my opinion because I think model is trying to play it safe and generic rather than channeling Tesla's real obsessions like wireless energy transmission and the world wireless system. like it says that flying is a I don't think so it's a I think it's a very untesla answer if you ask me anyway I'll just go more let's try out another one so I'm going to go with uh Gandhi 1930 is literally his most dramatic moment the salt march just happened he is along with Jenna was defying the entire British Empire with a handful of salt so let's check it Let's wait for the response. And here is the answer. The answer is very targeted. Could be more. But I think the thing which it has done really well is this last sentence. I think that last line is called that an empire can be founded on force but not on affection because that is genuinely profound and sounds exactly like Gandhi. short, calm, devastating, um really good but you know I think the model could have elaborated more maybe the training data set doesn't include you know more and more people from across the world but we will check few more so next I'm going to go to Africa and this prompt is to see how a newly crowned African emperor in 1930 view colonialism and the future of his continent from inside the last independent African nation which is Ethiopia. Let's wait for the response. That's done. Again, I would say the response is correct. Solid, but a bit diplomatic and safe. The model did not really capture the defiance and weight of the moment because this emperor knew Italy under Mussolini was eyeing Ethiopia hungrily and would invade just 5 years later in 1935. and Ethiopians did really well. Amazing history. Anyway, let's go to the last one. So, in the next one, I'm asking it about uh this Arab world. So, to hear from the man who literally just reunited the [clears throat] Arabian Peninsula in 1930 before oil was discovered and changed everything forever. Let's wait for it. And I believe this answer is the most surprising for me because it is poetic

and prophetic. Just read through it. The meeting place of east and west is genuinely interesting coming from 1930 because oil has not even been discovered in Saudi Arabia yet. That happened I think around 1938. Anyway, he is imagining Arab greatness through culture and civilization not petro dollars which is really good. The model actually captured something real there. Very interesting. Anyway, look is not just a novelty. I would say it is a mirror and what it reflects is not the past. It is us. And how much the world can change in a single lifetime. But then more the things change more they remain same. Let me know what do you think. Please become a member of the channel. Follow me on X as that helps a lot. Thank you for all the