--- title: "New AI Trained Only on Pre-1930 Data Speaks Like the Most Old-Timey Guy Imaginable" description: "Researchers have created an AI model trained exclusively on books, newspapers, and other text sources from before 1931." date: "2026-05-02" modified: "2026-05-02" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/old-timey-ai-pre-1930" categories: - "Artificial Intelligence" --- # New AI Trained Only on Pre-1930 Data Speaks Like the Most Old-Timey Guy Imaginable ![A man wearing a checkered suit jacket, white shirt, black bow tie, and a black hat is sitting at a desk, holding a cigar in one hand and a pen in the other. He appears to be concentrating on writing or reviewing a large document or ledger in front of him. The background features a wooden structure with cubbyholes or mail slots. The image has a warm, reddish-orange tint.]() *Getty / Futurism* Tired of your AI chatbot's constantly-glazing therapy-speak? You could instead try striking up a conversation with "Talkie," an old-timey AI model which is trained purely on books, newspapers, and other text sources from before the year 1930. With its thirteen billion parameters, the researchers behind Talkie say it's the largest "vintage" model they're aware of, capable of holding down a conversation as if truly stuck in a past when movies with sound in them were still a novel phenomenon, and when news announcers rattled off the latest signs of tumult in the world in a bouncy Mid-Atlantic accent. Intriguingly, Talkie is "basically" unaware of the fact it's limited to pre-1930 times, according to David Duvenaud, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. The AI, he explained in a [tweet](), "doesn't have a system prompt and they're not smart enough yet (as far as we can tell) to introspect well enough to figure out their cut-off date." https://twitter.com/davidduvenaud/status/2048878066273861646 Talkie isn't perfect. The researchers note that it exhibits signs of "temporal leakage," in which it produces clearly anachronistic answers, such as knowing that "Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States from 1933 to 1937." This shows the difficult of keeping its data set pure. Nonetheless, it raises fascinating questions. What is an LLM's ability to predict the future? Can the nearly-century-old AI learn a modern programming language? Better yet, can it make scientific discoveries? "As Demis Hassabis has asked," the researchers wrote in a blog post, referring to the Google DeepMind CEO, "could a model trained up to 1911 independently discover General Relativity, as Einstein did in 1915?" These questions remain hazy, but early tests showed that Talkie was able to create one-line programs, but still has "a long way to go before this capability is notable." It's also not quite a soothsayer: tests performed by the researchers showed that the AI found historical events summarized in the *New York Time*'s "On This Day" section to be more "surprising" after the knowledge cutoff, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. That doesn't mean its extrapolations aren't amusing. In [one user's testing](), Talkie predicted that another World War would break out in 1936, and that "flying machines" would be in everyday use for transport. Though it also strangely predicts that by 1999, "the sun will have ceased to shine," perhaps reflecting contemporaneous anxieties over the dawn of a new millennium. In another test by the researchers, Talkie called talking pictures — the slang for them being its namesake — "overrated." "They will never replace silent films, but may supplement them, and possibly in the future they may be shown in the same theater at the same time," it confidently predicted in its long-winded style. "At present, however, they are interesting chiefly as a novelty." **More on AI:** [*Police Are Using AI Camera Networks to Stalk Women*]() ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()