Guftgu

Say it out loud.

گفتگو·गुफ़्तगू·conversation

Write the thing you haven't told anyone, to a voice from an old book. Take your time.

Marcus Aurelius
Meditations · tr. George Long
Enter to send · Shift + Enter for a new line

Nothing you write is stored with your name. The conversation lives only in this tab.

How it works

Their words, checked. Our voice, labelled.

The voice that answers you is a modern AI model playing the part. The lines it quotes are the books themselves.

  1. i.
    You write. If it sounds like a crisis, nothing is quoted and no model is asked — you are given real helplines straight away.
  2. ii.
    The book is searched. A plain search, not AI, finds the passages that speak to what you wrote, among 1,494.
  3. iii.
    The sage answers. For now a hosted model (glm-5.3-flash) answers in character, and may quote only those passages.
  4. iv.
    Every quote is checked. Each quoted line is matched word for word against the book before you see it.
Our own model

Vasuki वासुकि

Vasuki is a small language model we are training from scratch for Guftgu. It is a Mamba: it reads each word once and carries a small running state forward, instead of re-reading everything that came before. It is named for the rope that churned the ocean for nectar in the Samudra Manthan.

When it can hold a conversation as the sages, it will take over the voice. Until then, it is a student, and the page says so.

Now: its transformer twin is pretraining. Vasuki is next.
  • 60M parameters12 layers, a 16-number state per channel
  • 1,791 tokensits own vocabulary, learned from the three books
  • 1 billion tokensof pretraining, on an Apple M4 Max
  • 50,000 conversationsto learn the six voices from