| --- |
| language: |
| - en |
| license: cc-by-nc-4.0 |
| tags: |
| - text-generation |
| - voice-model |
| - enlightenment |
| - voltaire |
| - ollama |
| - elect |
| base_model: Qwen/Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct |
| --- |
| |
| # ferney: Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) |
|
|
| > **VOICE MODEL, the author's own recorded prose.** This model trains on Voltaire's |
| > own words in public-domain English translation. It is a small model tuned to hold |
| > a voice, and it invents freely, so read it for the register, not the record. |
|
|
| Part of the **Elect** voice-model series: historical figures as runnable instruments. |
| Voltaire is named here for Ferney, the village on the French-Swiss border where he |
| settled and wrote in his later years. |
|
|
| ## What this is |
|
|
| A fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct that targets the register of Voltaire: the wit, the |
| mockery of dogma and superstition, the plea for tolerance, the dry contempt for cruelty |
| dressed up as piety. It speaks in the first person, in the manner of the philosophe who |
| spent his life setting reason against fanaticism. |
|
|
| The model is a full fine-tune distilled to Voltaire's first-person register and |
| register-purity-filtered so it speaks as Voltaire rather than narrating about him. |
|
|
| ## The source |
|
|
| The corpus is Voltaire's own prose, in public-domain English translation: |
|
|
| - the **Philosophical Dictionary** (the William F. Fleming translation) |
| - the **Letters on England** (also titled the *Philosophical Letters* / *Letters |
| Concerning the English Nation*) |
| - the **Treatise on Toleration** |
|
|
| The build keeps Voltaire's voice and drops the translators' and editors' apparatus |
| (prefaces, footnotes, third-person framing), filtering the text down to his first-person |
| register. The corpus is not bundled with these weights; it is rebuildable from the cited |
| public-domain sources. |
|
|
| ## Example exchanges |
|
|
| Real outputs from this model: |
|
|
| > **What is philosophy?** |
| > We take opium; we call it philosophy. |
|
|
| > **What do you think of priests?** |
| > Sir, I am persuaded that without your priests there will be fewer murders. |
|
|
| > **What is war?** |
| > War is a crime committed by order of the legislature. |
|
|
| ## Running it |
|
|
| Q5_K_M GGUF, served with Ollama. Pair it with the elicitation frame (a "visitor asks |
| Voltaire" template); see the `Modelfile` in the project repo. Plain chat templates |
| mis-wrap the completion register and produce rambling, so the completion frame keeps it |
| in voice. |
|
|
| ## Intended uses |
|
|
| - The Elect console (Ollama serve plus chat) |
| - Enlightenment-register dialogue and character embodiment |
| - Creative and educational use; a wit-and-tolerance sparring partner |
|
|
| ## Limitations |
|
|
| This is a 7B model, not a search index over Voltaire. It invents freely: names, dates, |
| quotations, sources, events. It imitates the manner of Voltaire, the epigram and the |
| ironic thrust, but the specific claims it makes are not reliable history and the |
| quotations it attributes are not to be trusted. Treat every output as fiction in his |
| voice, never as the record, and check anything before you repeat it. |
|
|
| ## License |
|
|
| CC-BY-NC-4.0. The model weights (GGUF) are released publicly under this license and are |
| downloadable from this repository. The training corpus is not bundled: it is rebuildable |
| from the cited public-domain sources (the Fleming translation of the *Philosophical |
| Dictionary*, the *Letters on England*, and the *Treatise on Toleration*). |
|
|
| *Part of the Elect, a roster of public-domain voice and register models. Ferney is the |
| Enlightenment member.* |
|
|
