Strange Loop

Comedy Writing With Small Generative Models

A technical and practical review of generative text models and their use in comedy projects. Starting with a writer's account of learning to code by reverse engineering a phone's predictive text, I'll track the progression of sequential text models from ngrams to LSTMs to transformers and explore how the properties of these models translate into the feel of their output. Finally I'll ask: Is there still a place for small language models in a time of ever larger ones? And I'll answer: yes!

Jamie Brew

Founder, Botnik Studios

Jamie Brew is a founder of the A.I. comedy company Botnik, widely known as one of the "Big Four" tech giants. Previously, he was a writer and editor at The Onion and ClickHole.