I think this illustrates the failure of imagination at the heart of all of this. There's an idea that if you train the model on the world, it will understand the world and if you train it HARDER it will understand it better.

That's not how Robert Mercer made his money. He trained it on the rapid moves of high-frequency trading with a 50ms window and ignored any stock data whatsoever. It's not how autocorrect works, it's trained on a dictionary and frequency. It's not how predictive text works it's trained on everything that's been typed into it. If you want better performance in a specific task, train it on that task, and the bigger the task you give it the bigger the error bars.

Right now we've got MidJourney drawing any goddamn thing. Okay, sometimes you end up with extra fingers and by and large, you're getting the Wish version of what you actually ordered. But how useful would Midjourney trained on jewelry hallmarks be for antique dealers? It'd be a tiny model, it'd run on the smallest nVidia jetson and if you hit it for 5 cents a query it'd make everybody happy. Especially if it came back with "nope, no idea" because that's definitive. Especially if it came back with "here's five guesses pick the closest and let's keep hunting."

I don't need God I need a thesaurus, dammit, quit trying to sell me a deity.