y1n0

Mr. Chatterbox is a Victorian-era ethically trained model

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/30/mr-chatterbox/

Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer

Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here’s how he describes it in the model card: Mr. Chatterbox is a …

Simon Willison’s Weblog
Mar 31 at 2:26amWeb
Show threadparpfishMar 31
after testing, i'm pretty sure that either a) i dont understand Victorian speech very well or b) a model with 340million parameters doesn't generate particularly coherent speech
Show threadstarkparkerMar 31
b: "The 2022 Chinchilla paper suggests a ratio of 20x the parameter count to training tokens. For a 340m model that would suggest around 7 billion tokens, more than twice the British Library corpus used here. The smallest Qwen 3.5 model is 600m parameters and that model family starts to get interesting at 2b—so my hunch is we would need 4x or more the training data to get something that starts to feel like a useful conversational partner."