Comment by imjonse

3 days ago

I suppose the vast majority of training data used for cutting edge models was created after 1900.

Ofc they are because their primary goal is to be useful and to be useful they need to always be relevant.

But considering that Special Relativity was published in 1905 which means all its building blocks were already floating in the ether by 1900 it would be a very interesting experiment to train something on Claude/Gemini scale and then say give in the field equations and ask it to build a theory around them.

  • His point is that we can't train a Gemini 3/Claude 4.5 etc model because we don't have the data to match the training scale of those models. There aren't trillions of tokens of digitized pre-1900s text.

  • How can you train a Claude/Gemini scale model if you’re limited to <10% of the training data?

I don't know if this is related to the topic, but GPT5 can convert an 1880 Ottoman archival photograph to English, and without any loss of quality.

  • My friend works in that period of Ottoman archives. Do you have a source or something I can share?