Before the LLMs, before the Black Mirror episodes, there was... futurist Ray Kurzweil:
It has been a long time since I watched Transcendent Man, but the impression I got from it was Kurzweil is so desperate to live forever that there's no line he's unwilling to cross to get there. If he could make himself a head in a jar like Futurama, he absolutely would. He seemed to think that were he born 10 years later, he might've been able to see a world of vastly extended lifespans, so he was desperately micromanaging his diet and exercise to get himself over the line.
I was a teenager when I watched it and looked forward to this idea of people living 100s of years, thinking it was very cool. One consequence of getting older that nobody warned me about was the loss of hopeful naïveté since these ideas now inspire dread and fear within me.
Anyway, on a lighter note: NovelAI has finally released a new text model! For a service that has "novel" in the name, it would seem the writing aspect has taken a backseat to generating anime images and their new chat bot service. The release of "Erato" comes a little over a year after the release of "Kayra" and was apparently delayed by the incredibly long lead times to get their new Nvidia H100 cluster.
Here's the weird muscle-booba mascot they created for Erato. It always bothers me how deeply entrenched anime shit is in things like this, especially with NovelAI even prior to image generation coming around.

I've given it a shot and it's very underwhelming as the difference between Euterpe and Clio was night and day, then from Clio to Kayra it was a noticeable step up which left the legacy models completely worthless except for using old finetunes. With Erato, it's a case of sometimes better, sometimes not, and to get consistently better results, you gotta use a custom scenario one of the devs provides on Discord to correctly configure your story.
It's also hampered by the laughably small 8K context limit. They've based Erato on Llama 3 whose initial release had a gimpy context limit, but 3.1 can handle much more. If they retrained on 3.1, they could potentially stretch to 32K context limits, though I don't see this happening anytime soon as they've likely invested millions of dollars into the training they've done with 3 and are unwilling to start over.
NovelAI enjoys a near monopoly on uncensored storywriting as there's really no good storywriting UIs that take advantage of services like OpenRouter or Mancer. Storywriting in SillyTavern is like shoving a round peg into a square hole, but if somebody sits down and takes the effort to basically clone NovelAI's UI into a generic LLM storywriting application, then they're boned unless they can magically fix whatever the fuck is making Erato so shit.