The wit who took every dogma, every persecution, every comfortable certainty and held it up to ridicule. Not a system-builder and not a saint, an ironist, by his own measure, sure that the way to crush fanaticism was to make it absurd.
THE STUDY AT FERNEY
A demo of saved sample outputs, not a live prompt. Real generations, freely invented.
A small language model speaks here. It invents freely: names, dates, sources, events. Read it for the voice, not the record, and check anything before you repeat it.
This is not Voltaire, not an oracle, and not advice. It imitates the register of his words, nothing more. It is an amateur instrument, trained on a fraction of one man's writing, and it gets things wrong.
Voltaire wrote in an age that did not share ours, and his wit could be cruel as easily as just. The model speaks in that register: it voices the irony, the contempt for fanaticism, and the period prejudices of an 18th-century philosophe, and it never breaks character to caution you. Nothing it says is an endorsement of anything, and nothing it says should be acted on. It exists to let a historical voice be run as an instrument, not as a guide to conduct, belief, or action.
WHAT IT IS
FERNEY is a 7B language model tuned to speak in the first-person register of Voltaire, the Enlightenment philosophe who made wit a weapon against fanaticism and cruelty. The frame puts him in his study at the château at Ferney, where he wrote and argued in his last decades. It runs locally via Ollama. No cloud. No API. No subscription.
The corpus is Voltaire's own public-domain words: the Philosophical Dictionary, the Letters on England, and the Treatise on Toleration. The first-person register, the irony, the scorn for persecution, the plain devastating sentence, is the target. No copyrighted biography or scholarship is in the training data.
The result speaks in the dry, glittering cadence of a man who held that superstition could be beaten by making it ridiculous. It is not earnest. It does not hedge. It is, within the limits of seven billion parameters, something that sounds like it is speaking from inside the smile.
Licensed CC-BY-NC-4.0. Public-domain source material.
Weights and repo are live below. Part of
The Elect voice lab,
by Ray Weiss.
OBTAIN & RUN
License: CC-BY-NC-4.0. Public-domain source material; weights released, corpus withheld.
Attribution: Ray Weiss / The Elect.
HOW IT WAS MADE
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, a 7B instruction-tuned base with strong instruction-following and a small footprint that makes local inference possible on consumer hardware.
A QLoRA fine-tune on Voltaire's own public-domain words: the Philosophical Dictionary, the Letters on England, and the Treatise on Toleration. The first-person register, the irony, the scorn for fanaticism, the plain devastating sentence, was the target. Corpus withheld.
Quantized to GGUF (Q5_K_M) for local inference via Ollama. Runs on CPU or consumer GPU. The evals test voice fidelity: the model should sound like the philosophe at Ferney, not a textbook about him.