A note from the editors

What this is, and why we built it

Talkie is a chat program with a personality from another century. You write a question, and a small artificial gentleman named Charles writes back. He reads as if he were stuck somewhere around 1930, because his training stops about there.

The model

The mind behind Charles is the work of Thomas Gauthier, who fine-tuned a thirteen-billion-parameter language model on books, encyclopedias, and periodicals from the early twentieth century. The weights are public, and any technically-minded reader may download the same model and run it themselves, as we do here.

huggingface.co/thomasgauthier/talkie-1930-13b-it-GGUF

The chat program

The website you are reading is built on top of that model by the team at Applesauce, a small workshop of services and curiosities living at hub.applesauce.chat. Several other projects share the same roof, all run from the same closet of computers, all written in the same evenings.

The source for Talkie is open. Anyone may read it, copy it, file a complaint about it, or improve it.

github.com/Tsangares/talkie-applesauce

The hardware

Inference runs on two retired NVIDIA RTX 3060 graphics cards in a wardrobe at home, networked into a small VPS by way of a reverse SSH tunnel. The model is loaded once and held in graphics memory until the lights go out. Nothing about your conversation leaves the cluster.

How a message gets to Charles

Your message is wrapped with a short system prompt instructing the model to behave as Charles, an English valet of the period. It is sent to llama-server, which decodes the next several hundred words and streams them back over a Server-Sent Events connection. Conversations are stored in a small database keyed to a session cookie. If you sign in with email, that session becomes a permanent thread you can return to from any device.

We do not run advertisements. We do not pass your conversation text to a third-party model provider, because there is no third- party model. The whole machine is here on the desk.

Why bother

Modern chat models speak with a kind of corporate smoothness, the way an airline hold-recording speaks. Charles does not. His voice is fixed, particular, and frequently wrong. He thinks the moon is inhabited. He guesses that the internet must be a kind of woven rigging. He has not heard of a smartphone, but he will have a try, and his tries are the reason this exists.

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Credits

Return to the chat