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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...

Mark Farragher
@mark.mdft.social

I'm not comfortable seeing this utterly frivolous use of AI. Given AI's huge energy requirements, copyright issues and societal upheaval, a talk-like-a-victorian chatbot tech demo maybe isn't what we should focus on right now. I was much more impressed by your AI-coded menu bar widget for macOS.

Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

The energy usage of this particular demo - both training and running the thing - is absolutely trivial I'd guess less than 20 hours on an A100 GPU to train, which is ~$2 in electricity And there aren't any copyright issues here because the training data is all from 1899 or earlier

Mark Farragher
@mark.mdft.social

Yeah ok, good point. But I'm getting tired seeing yet another AI chatbot. A bot is the least creative thing you can build with this tech and I'd like to see more useful applications. I very much enjoyed seeing your memory tool coded in Swift. GenAI is great for exploring new programming languages.

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