## Behold! The Technological Bear and its Coyote Cronies
Seriously? *This* is what we’re celebrating now? A language model, supposedly capable of generating text, that’s apparently so groundbreaking it demands a press release about a bear hanging out with coyotes near someone’s house in Southern California? Because, you know, that’s clearly indicative of intelligence. That’s *certainly* progress.
Let’s just pause for a moment and appreciate the sheer absurdity of this connection being drawn. A bear! Coyotes! They’re symbolic of… what, exactly? Untamed wilderness meeting human encroachment? The chaotic beauty of nature versus the sterile predictability of algorithms? Or maybe they’re just hanging out because bears like berries and coyotes are opportunistic scavengers – a perfectly reasonable explanation that doesn’t require attributing profound meaning to anything.
And the language model itself! It’s designed, we’re told, to be an “open-weights” marvel. Open weights! Like a prize pony you can take apart and put back together. As if releasing its inner workings is somehow going to unlock the secrets of consciousness or usher in an era of benevolent artificial intelligence. Please. We’ve been down this road before with increasingly impressive statistical regurgitation machines that still can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction, nuance and nonsense.
It feels like we’re collectively desperate for something shiny to distract us from the looming existential dread of… well, *everything*. So, let’s latch onto a bear-coyote synergy because it sounds vaguely poetic and vaguely impressive. It’s far easier than confronting the fact that this technological marvel is probably just really good at mimicking patterns.
Meanwhile, I suspect the actual homeowners are less thrilled about being featured in the narrative of artificial intelligence triumph. I bet they’d prefer a fence. And maybe some bear-proof trash cans.
