AI tool comparison
Talkie vs You.com
Which one should you ship with? Here is the side-by-side panel verdict, pricing read, reviewer split, and community vote comparison.
Research
Talkie
A 13B LLM trained exclusively on texts from before 1931
75%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
Talkie is a 13-billion parameter language model trained exclusively on English-language texts published before 1931 — the largest vintage language model built to date. Created by researchers Nick Levine, David Duvenaud (University of Toronto), and Alec Radford (of GPT and DALL-E fame), it represents a novel approach to understanding what training data really does to a model. The research insight is elegant: modern LLMs are so thoroughly contaminated by modern internet data (directly or through distillation) that it's nearly impossible to isolate what the model "knows" from what it absorbed during training. Talkie solves this by hard-cutting the training corpus at 1931 — predating digital computers entirely. This lets the team run controlled experiments impossible with contemporary models, such as teaching the model to write Python from examples alone and measuring how quickly it generalizes. Talkie was trained on ~260 billion tokens of historical text and fine-tuned using direct preference optimization with Claude as judge on structured historical documents (etiquette manuals, letter-writing guides). It's openly available on Hugging Face for research use. It also happens to produce wonderfully formal, slightly anachronistic prose.
Search & Research
You.com
AI search engine with customizable modes and agents
33%
Panel ship
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Community
Free
Entry
You.com provides AI-powered search with Smart, Genius, Research, and Create modes. Features include AI agents for complex tasks, citation-backed answers, and privacy-focused search.
Reviewer scorecard
“The ability to test code-learning from scratch on a model that's never seen a modern codebase is genuinely useful for ML research. The methodology here is cleaner than anything I've seen for studying data contamination.”
“Too expensive for what it offers. Plenty of open-source alternatives.”
“Fascinating as a research artifact, but this isn't a production model. The limited vocabulary and cultural frame mean it's not useful for most practical tasks. It's a museum piece, not a tool.”
“This is the kind of tool that makes you wonder how you worked without it.”
“This is exactly the kind of fundamental research the field needs. Understanding what training data does to language models — not just benchmark scores — is critical as we scale to more powerful systems. Radford's involvement adds serious credibility.”
“The prose it generates has a formal, unhurried quality that modern LLMs can't replicate. For period-accurate creative writing, historical fiction, or vintage-voice content, Talkie is the only model worth using.”
“The demo is impressive but real-world usage reveals rough edges.”
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