[Dorialexander]

Hi! Model creator here. I happen to be a cultural historian and that's a main use case that I see. It's not complicated to learn about past events but having a general idea of the culture of the time (and its alieness from our perspective) is way harder. Monad is just prototype but there is a real potential for immersing experience through historical LLMs.

[benbreen]

Thanks for doing this. We should talk! I am a historian and have been exploring using LLMs in teaching (https://resobscura.substack.com/p/simulating-history-with-ch...). I love this idea. I’m fairly sure at this point that history education will be one of the fields most positively impacted by LLMs, just because there is so much potential for redeploying primary sources in creative ways like this.

[Dorialexander]

Certainly. In fact I see we already follow each other on Twitter :D

And yes totally. The other massive impact could be in source analysis. I have started using Mistral-Hermes for text annotation and it is both impressive and very fast.

[andy_ppp]

Would be interesting to check with a suitably trained LLM if our understand of historical wording is actually correct. Whole parts of history might be written down but lost in translation if you see what I'm saying...

[thfuran]

I don't see what you're saying. How do you propose to determine whether the current understanding is incorrect or the model is unsuitably trained?

[bambax]

Great project! Do you have a list of the training/fine tuning data that went into it?

A great use would be to enable one to have conversations with Pascal or Leibnitz, etc.

For instance, I published online the complete text of the Mémoires de Saint-Simon (written in 1745-1755, but describing the second part of the reign of Louis XIV and the Régence, 1695-1721).

Saint-Simon was described by his contemporaries to be one of the greats conversationalists of his time. It would be so cool to chat with him.

[Dorialexander]

I published the completely dataset here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/Pclanglais/MonadGPT

While I don't think Saint-Simon is included, a French colleague did a few try with it that turned out better than ChatGPT.

I'm currently working on an extended historical model for French (from 1000-2000) and maybe Saint-Simon memoirs will be included as well.

[ekianjo]

A roman era GPT would be fantastic

[Dorialexander]

Already in the work. Just had a meeting today with two latinists about it.

[xena]

What did you use to train this? I'm thinking about making a fine tune of my own and if you have some tips to train it easier that would be much appreciated!

[antifa]

Any chance anyone is working on one for "the 80s"?

[progne]

This seems like a fine way to steel man a controversy by going directly to the sources. I'd like to be able to, e.g., dial up a debate between Karl Marx and Milton Friedman. Even better if it's possible for Karl to convince Milton or visa versa.