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!
