I think that will be quite enough AI, thank you very much

It’s been (inexactly) 46 days since my last rant, and the place wouldn’t feel the same if I wasn’t (mildly) furiously hammering my current train of thought into vim, bare-brained, like the semi-civilized ape-like creature that we all are when bereft of our AI crutches. Even as (finally) Z.ai puts out something that is close enough to Claude and Codex and the bemonied digerati gushed all over Twitter (yes, I still refuse to call it “X”) that finally they can run something comparable to cloud models locally (for the cheap price of a kidney or two), I have to ask myseilf why the fuck we are doing this (and yes, that is an expletive–if you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I am usually much more restrained than this and that it was by no means gratuitous). I mean, just go and watch Gergely Orosz’s presentation1 and tell me if any of the stories he tells make sense in anything but this timeline, where the only thing that matters is exposure/hype, individuals vie for social media…