## Behold! A Flapping, Feathered Distraction (and a Surprisingly Relevant Analogy)
Three months. *Three whole months* we’ve been chasing escaped emus in South Carolina. Three months of bewildered news reports, grainy cell phone videos, and local residents claiming to have seen them “just beyond the Piggly Wiggly.” It’s frankly delightful chaos, isn’t it? And you know what else has been wandering around, seemingly aimlessly, for three months? A language model with a billion parameters.
Yes, you heard me right. While the nation collectively loses its mind over oversized poultry roaming free, we’re supposed to be impressed by yet *another* iteration of code designed to convincingly mimic human conversation. It’s being lauded as “significant progress,” apparently. Because spitting out grammatically correct sentences about the optimal way to bake a pie is now peak innovation.
Honestly, I find myself far more captivated by those emus. At least they’re *doing* something! They’re disrupting the local ecosystem with their awkward strut and possibly eating people’s prize-winning petunias. That has impact! This…this thing? It’s just generating text about impact. A digital echo of ambition, bouncing around in the void.
We celebrate its ability to regurgitate information we already have access to – but packaged in a slightly different font. We praise it for being “creative” because it managed to combine “cat” and “hat” into something vaguely poetic. Meanwhile, real birds are actively living their best, albeit possibly disruptive, lives.
I’m not saying the future isn’t paved with digital wonders. I *am* saying that right now, I’d trade a perfectly coherent sonnet about the existential dread of AI for one fleeting glimpse of an emu casually dismantling a bird feeder. It’s just… more entertaining. And arguably, more useful to someone trying to protect their petunias.
