History LLMs: Models trained exclusively on pre-1913 texts

They are currently in the middle of a Korean War version: https://youtube.com/@thekoreanwarbyindyneidell

With Alphonse X, o The Cid, it would be greater issues, but understandable over weeks.

LLMs are just seemingly intelligent autocomplete engines, and until they figure a way to stop the hallucinations, they aren't great either.

Every piece of code a developer churns out using LLMs will be built from previous code that other developers have written (including both strengths and weaknesses, btw). Every paragraph you ask it to write in a summary? Same. Every single other problem? Same. Ask it to generate a summary of a document? Don't trust it here either. [Note, expect cyber-attacks later on regarding this scenario, it is beginning to happen -- documents made intentionally obtuse to fool an LLM into hallucinating about the document, which leads to someone signing a contract, conning the person out of millions].

If you ask an LLM to solve something no human has, you'll get a fabrication, which has fooled quite a few folks and caused them to jeopardize their career (lawyers, etc) which is why I am posting this.

I failed to catch the clue, btw.

Oh sorry, spoilers.

(Hell, I miss Capaldi)

So as a black person should I demand that all books written before the civil rights act be destroyed?

The past is messy. But it's the only way to learn anything.

All an LLM does it's take a bunch of existing texts and rebundle them. Like it or not, the existing texts are still there.

I understand an LLM that won't tell me how to do heart surgery. But I can't fear one that might be less enlightened on race issues. So many questions to ask! Hell, it's like talking to older person in real life.

I don't expect a typical 90 year old to be the most progressive person, but they're still worth listening too.

I suspect restricting access could equally be a comment on modern LLMs in general, rather than the historical material specifically. For example, we must be constantly reminded not to give LLMs a level of credibility that their hallucinations would have us believe.

But I'm fascinated by the possibility that somehow resurrecting lost voices might give an unholy agency to minds and their supporting worldviews that are so anachronistic that hearing them speak again might stir long-banished evils. I'm being lyrical for dramatic affect!

I would make one serious point though, that do I have the credentials to express. The conversation may have died down, but there is still a huge question mark over, if not the legality, but certainly the ethics of restricting access to, and profiting from, public domain knowledge. I don't wish to suggest a side to take here, just to point out that the lack of conversation should not be taken to mean that the matter is settled.

We all get that academics now exist in some kind of dystopian horror where they can get transitively blamed for the existence of anyone to the right of Lenin, but bear in mind:

1. The people who might try to cancel you are idiots unworthy of your respect, because if they're against this project, they're against the study of history in its entirety.

2. They will scream at you anyway no matter what you do.

3. You used (Swiss) taxpayer funds to develop these models. There is no moral justification for withholding from the public what they worked to pay for.

You already slathered your README with disclaimers even though you didn't even release the model at all, just showed a few examples of what it said - none of which are in any way surprising. That is far more than enough. Just release the models and if anyone complains, politely tell them to go complain to the users.

Movie studios have done that for years with old movies. TCM still shows Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind.

Edit: I saw further down that you've already done this! What more is there to do?

What do these people fear the most? That the "truth" they been pushing is a lie.

When you're looking at e.g. the 19th century, a huge number are preserved somewhere in some library, but the vast majority don't seem to be digitized yet, given the tremendous amount of work.

Given how much higher-quality newspaper content tends to be compared to the average internet forum thread, there actually might be quite a decent amount of text. Obviously still nothing compared to the internet, but still vastly larger than just from published books. After all, print newspapers were essentially the internet of their day. Oh, and don't forget pamphlets in the 18th century.

Hm there is a lot of text from before the internet, but most of it is not on internet. There is a weird gap in some circles because of that, people are rediscovering work from pre 1980s researchers that only exist in books that have never been re-edited and that virtually no one knows about.

Something like a pop-sci article along the lines of "Mad scientists create racist, imperialistic AI"?

I honestly don't see publication of the weights as a relevant risk factor, because sensationalist misrepresentation is trivially possible with the given example responses alone.

I don't think such pseudo-malicious misrepresentation of scientific research can be reliably prevented anyway, and the disclaimers make your stance very clear.

On the other hand, publishing weights might lead to interesting insights from others tinkering with the models. A good example for this would be the published word prevalence data (M. Brysbaert et al @Ghent University) that led to interesting follow-ups like this: https://observablehq.com/@yurivish/words

I hope you can get the models out in some form, would be a waste not to, but congratulations on a fascinating project regardless!

I think the uncensored response is still valuable, with context. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" sort of thing.

Edit: just thought of a practical step you can take: host it somewhere else than github. If there's ever going to be a backlash the microsoft moderators might not take too kindly to the stuff about e.g. homosexuality, no matter how academic.

This is absolutely nothing new. With experimental things, it's non uncommon for a lab to develop a new technique and omit slight but important details to give them a competitive advantage. Similarly in the simulation/modelling space it's been common for years for researchers to not publish their research software. There's been a lot of lobbying on that side by groups such as the Software Sustainability Institute and Research Software Engineer organisations like RSE UK and RSE US, but there's a lot of researchers that just think that they shouldn't have to do it, even when publicly funded.

Or, how about, "If we release this as is, then some people will intentionally mis-use it and create a lot of bad press for us. Then our project will get shut down and we lose our jobs"

Be careful assuming it is a power trip when it might be a fear trip.

I've never been as unimpressed by society as I have been in the last 5 years or so.

We can debate on whether it's good or not, but ultimately they're publishing it and in some very small way responsible for some of its ends. At least that's how I can see their interest in disseminating the use of the LLM through a responsible framework.

Even if I give the comment a lot of wiggle room (such as changing "every" to "many"), I don't think even a watered-down version of this hypothesis passes Occam's razor. There are more plausible explanations, including (1) genuine concern by the authors; (2) academic pressures and constraints; (c) reputational concerns; (d) self-interest to embargo underlying data so they have time to be the first to write-it-up. To my eye, none of these fit the category of "getting high on power".

Also, patience is warranted. We haven't seen what these researchers are doing to release -- and from what I can tell, they haven't said yet. At the moment I see "Repositories (coming soon)" on their GitHub page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362

This would probably get easier towards the start of the 20th century ofc

Where does it say that? I tried to find more detail. Thanks.

I’m curious, they have the example of raw base model output; when LLMs were first identified as zero shot chatbots there was usually a prompt like “A conversation between a person and a helpful assistant” that preceded the chat to get it to simulate a chat.

Could they have tried a prefix like “Correspondence between a gentleman and a knowledgeable historian” or the like to try and prime for responses?

I also wonder about the whether the whole concept of “chat” makes sense in 18XX. We had the idea of AI and chatbots long before we had LLMs so they are naturally primed for it. It might make less sense as a communication style here and some kind of correspondence could be a better framing.

I also wonder that you'd get this kind of performance with actual, just pre-1900s text. LLMs work because they're fed terabytes of text, if you just give it gigabytes you get a 2019 word model. The fundamental technology is mostly the same, after all.

Under Chinchilla model the larger model always performs better than the small one if trained on the same amount of data. I'm not sure if it is true empirically, and probably 1-10B is a good guess for how large the model trained on 80B tokens should be.

Similarly, the small models continue to improve beyond 20:1 ratio, and current models are trained on much more data. You could train a better performing model using the same compute, but it would be larger which is not always desirable.

I suspect that absent a trained in fictional context in which to operate ("You are a helpful chatbot"), it would answer in a way consistent with what a random person in 1914 would say if you asked them what they are.

Some people are still outraged about the Bible, even though the writers of it has been dead for thousands of years. So the modern mass produced man and woman probably does not have a cut-off date where they look at something as history instead of examining if it is for or against her current ideology.

I wonder what it might have predicted about the future of MS, Intel and IBM given the status quo at the time too.

I've used Google books a lot in the past, and Google's time-filtering feature in searches too. Not to mention Spotify's search features targeting date of production. All had huge temporal mislabeling problems.

Feeling a bit defensive? That is not at all my point; I value history highly and read it regularly. I care about it, thus my questions:

> gives us an interactive compression of the views from a specific point in history without the subsequent coloring by the actual events of history.

What validity does this 'compression' have? What is the definition of a 'compression'? For example, I could create random statistics or verbiage from the data; why would that be any better or worse than this 'compression'?

Interactivity seems to be a negative: It's fun, but it would seem to highly distort the information output from the data, and omits the most valuable parts (unless we luckily stumble across it). I'd much rather have a systematic presentation of the data.

These critiques are not the end of the line; they are step in innovation, which of course raises challenging questions and, if successful, adapts to the problems. But we still need to grapple with them.

Sooner or later society has to come emotionally to terms with the fact that other times and places value things completely different from us, hold as important things we don't care about and are indifferent to things we do care about.

Intellectually I'm sure we already know, but e.g. banning old books because they have reprehensible values (or even just use nasty words) - or indeed, refusing to release a model trained on historic texts "because it could be abused" is a sign that emotionally we haven't.

It's not that it's a small deal, or should be expected to be easy. It's basically what Popper called "the strain of civilization" and posited as explanation for the totalitarianism which was rising in his time. But our values can't be so brittle that we can't even talk or think about other value systems.

People typically get outraged when they see something they weren't expecting. If you tell them ahead of time, the user typically won't blame you (they'll blame themselves for choosing to ignore the disclaimer).

And if disclaimers don't work, rebrand and relaunch it under a different name.

This is a research project, and it is clear how it was trained, and targeted at experts, enthusiasts, historians. Like if I was studying racism, the reference books explicitly written to dissect racism wouldn't be racist agents with a racist agenda. And as a result, no one is banning these books (except conservatives that want to retcon american history).

Foundational models spewing racist white supremecist content when the trillion-dollar company forces it in your face is a vastly different scenario.

There's a clear difference.

I feel like, ironically, it would be folks less concerned with political correctness/not being offensive that would abuse this opportunity to slander the project. But that’s just my gut.

consider this: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nytimes.com

HN's most beloved shitrag. day after day, they attack AI from every angle. how many of those submissions get traction at this point?