Whether something is a religion or not is mainly up the the view of the individual. I have known religious Scientologists, i.e. Scientologists who viewed it as a religion. Yeah, it's silly, and based on lies, but name a religion that I can be convinced isn't. My favorite religion admits that it was created to fulfill a college religion requirement....but that doesn't stop it from being an actual religion...with a few members who seriously view it that way.

That's definitely true. There are at least three ongoing religions besides Scientology that were officially started as ... well, not jokes exactly. One of them was started to satisfy a college requirement that students have religious activity.

But the thing is, what a religion is started for has little to do with what it develops into. Decades later many of the followers of the particular religion that I am most familiar with take it quite seriously. (I've no clue as to how serious the Jedi are.)

Well, it fits me. (Even though I'm more a user than a system programmer.)

You're making MUCH too wide an assertion. There are areas where the AI is better, but it's competence is "jagged". If you say it's better at guessing protein folding, I'll agree. if you say it's a better surgeon...not this month. Probably not this year. But it's better in certain specific areas, and those areas are increasing.

Cartoons *can* be educational. (I think you're right, but I'm quibbling with your terminology.)

He's evil, but I'm not sure he's in the running for most evil.
The problem is that he's also extremely powerful, and is surrounded by people (and machines) that reinforce his delusions. So even minor evils get magnified into atrocities.

Turning a project that size into a FOSS project would kill it. FOSS projects need to start small and grow a community of support. It would be possible to turn it into an OSS project, develop a community, and then spin off as FOSS parts of it that could later merge, but that's *extremely* unlikely...and would probably take decades.

More plausible would be to publish the current version as a working snapshot under a FOSS license, but for the company to maintain copyright ownership, so they could continue to work on a closed source version. That would probably be workable, but I hardly think it plausible.

Also, remember that thing to too large to even be built on most systems. This is hardly ideal for a FOSS project. (Does a FOSS project exist that is larger than Linux or BSD? Possibly LibreOffice. This would be a lot larger.)

To be totally fair, they're *part* of a cure. A necessary part, but a small part. The basic thing that needs to change is the economic focus. Consumption, itself, should not be the goal. Profit needs redefinition...though just how I don't know.

Consider the system rewards "fast food" over "healthy food". This is clearly wrong, but what's the proper fix? It's another aspect of the same problem.

Hero worship is always dangerous, but people tend to do it anyway. I still admire many things Musk has done, but that doesn't mean I need to admire him...or even the person he used to be. I used to say "I'm glad he's doing that, but I sure wouldn't want to work for him". Now the first half of that has been truncated.

In this case though, I wish both sides could lose. It's possible, however, that Sam Altman still has a few good intentions.

No. Basically it's a move to handicap competition. But he's also trying to get any other advantages he can out of it.

And by cutting the country loose from its allies and destroying international faith, he may have weakened the country enough to avoid WWIII when China makes it's bid for recognition as the supreme power.

I tend to think they threw it on purpose. What purpose? I'm not sure. Perhaps they saw AI coming and didn't want to get blamed for it. But they knew the alternative was Trump, which makes choosing a candidate who had small chance of winning nearly an act of treason.

That's one interpretation. Or he could be an agent. The evidence is equivocal, but the actions are the same.

To be fair, oil is NOT a dying industry. Neither is coal. Shrinking isn't the same as dying. Both have uses that are (so far) essentially impossible to replace. Generating electricity, however, isn't one of them.

OTOH, you do have to allow for unscheduled maintenance. Wind farms are much better over pasture. In hot areas, solar panels can improve yields of many crops is planned with reasonable care. (But you still have to allow for unscheduled maintenance.)