Alec Radford has been part of basically every AI breakthrough you've heard of: GPT, CLIP, Whisper, to name a few. So when he, Nick Levine, and David Duvenaud drop something new, I pay attention.
This week they released talkie: a 13B model trained only on text written before 1931. No internet. No World War II. No transistor. The point isn't novelty, it's that a model frozen in 1930 is a clean lab for asking what AI actually generalizes vs. just memorizes. Can it independently invent a Turing machine? Predict the transistor? Learn to code purely from in-context examples?
Reading the thread I had a fun idea I couldn't shake.
What if you took the premise, experts from the past reacting to the future, and turned it into a podcast?
So I did. Meet The Coming Age, hosted by four characters frozen in 1930:
- Edmund Crale, the newspaperman
- Henry Aldrige Thorne, the historian
- Dr. Walter Brennan, the economist
- Theodore Marsden, the engineer
Episode 1 covers the networked age, from PCs and email through smartphones and social platforms.
Build: hosting talkie myself was a slog and I had problems using platforms, so I used Codex to orchestrate the back-and-forth with the model hosted on the chat webui and stitch the output into a clean script, then handed it off to Jellypod for voice synthesis and production.
Let me know if you have any ideas on where to take this show!
I'd take this info with a grain of salt. You have to understand how new some of these developments are. It's only been a couple of months since we hit the opus 4.5+ threshold. I created 4 react packages for kicks in a weekend: https://www.hackyexperiments.com/blog/shipping-react-librari...
I have always wondered how archives manage to capture screenshots of paywalled pages like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Do they have agreements with publishers, do their crawlers have special privileges to bypass detection, or do they use technology so advanced that companies cannot detect them?
This week they released talkie: a 13B model trained only on text written before 1931. No internet. No World War II. No transistor. The point isn't novelty, it's that a model frozen in 1930 is a clean lab for asking what AI actually generalizes vs. just memorizes. Can it independently invent a Turing machine? Predict the transistor? Learn to code purely from in-context examples?
Reading the thread I had a fun idea I couldn't shake.
What if you took the premise, experts from the past reacting to the future, and turned it into a podcast?
So I did. Meet The Coming Age, hosted by four characters frozen in 1930:
- Edmund Crale, the newspaperman
- Henry Aldrige Thorne, the historian
- Dr. Walter Brennan, the economist
- Theodore Marsden, the engineer
Episode 1 covers the networked age, from PCs and email through smartphones and social platforms.
Build: hosting talkie myself was a slog and I had problems using platforms, so I used Codex to orchestrate the back-and-forth with the model hosted on the chat webui and stitch the output into a clean script, then handed it off to Jellypod for voice synthesis and production.
Let me know if you have any ideas on where to take this show!
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