You were taught incorrectly then, I grew up catholic as well (also now atheist) and it was made very clear to me that it is not symbolic, it is an actual transformation. This is directly from the US conference of catholic bishops website: Is the Eucharist a symbol? The transformed bread and wine are truly the Body and Blood of Christ and are not merely symbols.

I remember very specifically that learning this official belief being one of the things that made me start questioning my religion. Like I can very clearly see that no transformation is happening so, it started making me question everything else they were telling me.

To be clear, We don’t really know the architecture or model size of claude or chatgpt. If opus is a 1 trillion parameter dense model, then yes of course it’s going to be way more expensive to run than deepseak which is an 862 billion parameter MoE model. American models have focused on being the best regardless of cost where chinese model makers were forced to focus on efficiency because of lack of access to chips. Which will probably give them an advantage as the free investor money runs out for the american companies.

The constant training is simply how AI works and will continue to work chinese or american. That cost will never go away. Anytime you need your model to learn new skills or gain new knowledge, it needs to be trained.

No, Catholics really believe that those crackers and wine are physically transformed into the flesh and blood of christ. Other christians treat it as symbolic, but catholics are very literal about it.