It's just a model

I, like many people, have witnessed and felt the whiplash between the seemingly-orgastic highs of the Astra launch and the experience of using the model. Whether intentional or otherwise, a lot of airtime was given in the brief pre-release hypecycle to Astra's ability to generate things that looked cool. Lots of games, renders, and canvas examples cluttered my various timelines. This makes sense: 3D stuff is cool; most people don't really have a sense of the toolchain involved in things like this, and how much of the effort is on the part of the LLM versus the structures it builds upon is somewhat obfuscated; platforms like xtheeverythingapp.com tend to reward videos and animations. I try (unsuccessfully) to remain sober about all of this. But the release of the model, coupled with things like the deeper information around the Hugging Face incident and Collusion.wiki, did ignite a bit of a spark in the back of my head — thinking, as always, however briefly, about the chance that…