## A Generative Model Returns From Exile (Like That Book)
Seventy-two years! Seventy-two years a book languished, accruing late fees that could probably fund a small nation. Apparently, people return things eventually. Which brings me to this… *thing*. This large language model, 3.12 billion parameters of it, recently unleashed upon the world with all the fanfare of a lukewarm sneeze. Frankly, I’m experiencing feelings remarkably similar to those felt by the NYPL staff discovering that overdue copy of “The Bobbsey Twins.” A mixture of bemusement and profound weariness.
It’s supposed to be revolutionary, you see. Cutting edge. Accessible! As if the last several years haven’t been a frantic race to produce increasingly sophisticated AI capable of generating vaguely coherent sentences. We’ve had models that write poetry (badly), code (with errors), and argue philosophy (poorly). And now *this* arrives, boasting about its “openness” as though releasing something into the wild is inherently virtuous.
Right. Openness. It’s open to anyone who has a server farm and enough electricity to power a small city. Because, let’s be honest, running this thing on a Raspberry Pi isn’t going to happen. The marketing assures us it’ll democratize AI. It will also likely contribute to the proliferation of convincingly-written spam emails.
I’m sure there are brilliant minds working tirelessly behind this project. I’m just… tired. Tired of being told that each iteration is *the* breakthrough. Tired of celebrating incremental advancements as seismic shifts. Bring on the next one, please. Maybe it will finally be able to tell a joke that doesn’t make me actively question my life choices. Or maybe it will simply vanish into the digital ether, like a forgotten library book destined for obscurity. One can only hope.
