Echo88-150M-Base

Echo88-150M-Base is a small English decoder-only causal language model trained from scratch on the Echo88 pretraining dataset.

The goal of Echo88 is to create a compact base model inspired by the language, computing culture, printed media, Usenet discussion, and older book knowledge available up to the late 1980s.

This is a base model, not an instruction-tuned chatbot. It is trained for next-token prediction and should be fine-tuned before being used as a helpful assistant.

Model Details

Model name: Echo88-150M-Base
Model type: Decoder-only causal language model
Training type: From scratch
Approx size: 150M parameters
Language: English
Context length: 2048 tokens
Tokenizer: Echo88 custom tokenizer
Intended use: Base pretraining / text generation / further fine-tuning

Training Data

Echo88-150M-Base was trained on the Echo88 Base Dataset, a cleaned English text corpus of approximately 1.17B tokens.

The dataset includes:

Books / Gutenberg-style public-domain text
UTZOO Usenet posts
BYTE Magazine
PC Magazine
TIME Magazine
Internet Archive Magazine Rack OCR text
Computer and technology magazine text
General historical magazine text

The dataset is designed to emphasize the period from the 1950s through the late 1980s, with a strong focus on early personal computing, Usenet, printed magazines, and older long-form writing.

Related dataset:

guus4324343/Echo88-Pretrain-1.17B

Intended Use

This model is intended for:

causal language modeling
retro / historical AI experiments
small language model research
continued pretraining
instruction tuning
1980s-style assistant experiments
computer-history model experiments

Recommended next step:

Echo88-150M-Base
→ supervised fine-tune on Echo88-Instruct-173K
→ Echo88-150M-Instruct

Not Instruction Tuned

This model is not yet trained to follow instructions reliably.

For chat or assistant behavior, use or create an instruction-tuned version using:

guus4324343/Echo88-Instruct-173K

Expected behavior of the base model:

continues text
completes paragraphs
imitates source style
may produce raw text rather than direct answers
may not follow commands consistently

Knowledge Boundary

Echo88 is designed around a historical data mixture ending around the late 1980s.

The model should not be expected to know modern topics such as:

Google
Wikipedia
iPhone
smartphones
modern social media
Windows 95 and later software
COVID-19
modern AI systems
2000s/2010s/2020s events

Because this is a base model, it may still hallucinate if prompted about modern events. A later instruction-tuned model should be trained to respond more carefully to post-1988 topics.

Example Usage

from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM
import torch

model_id = "guus4324343/Echo88-150M-Base"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(
    model_id,
    torch_dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="auto"
)

prompt = "The personal computer revolution of the 1980s"
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

with torch.no_grad():
    output = model.generate(
        **inputs,
        max_new_tokens=120,
        temperature=0.8,
        top_p=0.95,
        do_sample=True
    )

print(tokenizer.decode(output[0], skip_special_tokens=True))

Limitations

Echo88-150M-Base is experimental and small.

Known limitations:

not instruction tuned
may hallucinate
may repeat text
may produce OCR-like artifacts
may reflect outdated historical language or views
may struggle with complex reasoning
may not reliably refuse post-1988 topics
may produce incomplete or strange continuations

The model is intended for research and experimentation, not high-stakes use.

Bias and Historical Content

The training data includes historical books, magazines, and Usenet text. As a result, the model may reproduce outdated language, assumptions, stereotypes, or viewpoints present in older source material.

Users should review outputs carefully.

Training Notes

This model was trained as the base stage of the Echo88 project.

Planned model family:

Echo88-150M-Base
Echo88-150M-Instruct
Echo88-150M-Chat

License

The model weights are released under the Apache 2.0 license.

The training dataset is mixed-source and is released separately under other. Users are responsible for checking dataset source rights and suitability for their own use case.