Post

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Mr. Chatterbox is a really fun project. It's not great to talk to but it's a fun demo of what you can build using entirely out-of-copyright training data It's a 2GB nanochat model - I released a new llm-mrchatterbox plugin that can run it on my Mac simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/30/...

simonwillison.netMr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computerTrip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here’s how he describes it: Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained ent...
Ethan Mollick@emollick.bsky.social

Want to talk to the past? Here' an LLM "trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 & 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library" Quite different from an LLM roleplaying a Victorian. huggingface.co/spaces/tvent...

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

If you have uv installed you can start a conversation (after a 2GB model download) directly like this: uvx --with llm-mrchatterbox llm chat -m mrchatterbox

0 reposts17 likes

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

When I published this post I hadn't yet come across Trip's own writeup of the project, which provides way more detail about how he trained the model including SFT (supervised fine tuning) against synthetic chat examples created using Claude Haiku and GPT-4o-mini www.estragon.news/mr-chatterbo...

estragon.newsMr. Chatterbox, or, The Modern PrometheusA few days ago, I posted about a personal project that I've been working on for the last few weeks: Mr. Chatterbox, a chatbot trained from scratch on Victorian-era literature. I have to admit, I was t...