Are "Vintage LLMs" the start of a new humanistic field?

Imagine talking to the collective consciousness of an era. Not the consciousness of any single person, but instead, a simulated collectivity based on billions of words produced within a historical time and place. What would you ask it?

This is a hypothetical that is starting to become real thanks to recent work on what are called “Historical Language Models” or “ Vintage LLMs” (one marker of a new field is that there is no fixed name for it yet!). The largest such model to date, Talkie-1930, was released to the public on Monday. An even larger model is currently being trained. You can read the report announcing Talkie-1930 here, and talk to it directly here.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the chance to beta test Talkie and to meet with two members of the team that created it: AI res…