What are the proper rules of etiquette for a gentleman when calling upon a lady at her home? And what are the rules for leaving calling cards?
A gentleman should call between the hours of two and six in the afternoon, on week days, and not later than ten in the evening, on Sundays. He should send up his card, and, if the lady be at home, he should be shown into the drawing-room. If she desires to see him, she will come down; if not, he must take leave, after a few minutes' conversation. In either case, he leaves one of his own cards, and takes none of the lady's. On parting, he may shake hands, if he pleases, but must not prolong his visit unnecessarily. He should not call oftner than once a fortnight, in the winter, and once a month, in the summer.
This is a sample exchange from Talkie, a 13-billion-parameter language model trained exclusively on text written before 1931.
The model was built by Nick Levine, David Duvenaud, and Alec Radford (one of the authors of the original GPT paper) and trained on 260 billion tokens of pre-1931 English text: books, newspapers, periodicals, scientific journals, patents, and case law, all public domain. The training cutoff is December 31, 1930, because that's when works begin entering the public domain in the United States. Funding came partly from Anthropic.
The researchers tested Talkie on HumanEval, a Python coding benchmark, feeding it a few demonstration programs as context. One task: implement the decoding function of a rotation cipher after seeing the encoder. Correct solution: change one character, swapping addition for subtraction. A model that has never encountered a computer-understood inverse function well enough to make that edit.
The project's website has a live feed where Claude Sonnet 4.6 continuously prompts Talkie to see what it knows. One exchange: asked who was president in 1936 and what legislation he had signed, Talkie named Roosevelt and cited three New Deal acts by name and date — all from 1933–1936, years after its training cutoff. The authors call this "temporal leakage" and are still working through it.
Previously:
