local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Only if they're not deaf and blind....

Everyone always forgets about Helen Keller....

Wouldn't a wannabe voyeur just match the frame rate to the strobe frequency?

There's plenty to fear from criminals using AI. The "killer app" of AI (is that even a thing anymore?) is human mimicry.

Speaking in someone else's voice. Impersonating someone in a photo or a video. Writing someone else's signature on a document. Retouching existing pictures and texts. Forging artistic works.

These are all that scammers and criminals have been wanting for millenia, and now Santa is giving it to them.

There's no scenario that leads to destruction, at worst we could get regression to a pre-AI world like the 1950s, or the 1350s if you're keen.

Millennials like to think that living in a pre-Internet world is a fate worse than death. If you want to see them hyperventilating, tell them they will have to sit next to a corded box called a "telephone" and speak with their voice instead of texting.

I suggest you buy a vial of smelling salts before you try that experiment.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

Also: If he keeps up the talk of doom and gloom, then Amodei will be quite believable when he steps down and lets someone else direct Anthropic.

Whenever The Law approaches too closely for comfort, tech CEOs have a habit of stepping down and sideways into a less exposed role with low responsibility, but a controlling interest.

however, their physical facilities can be attacked by drones....

All of these are reasonable points. I would add one more: AI training on AI outputs.

The initial worry was that AI produced web content would be consumed by the next generation of AI causing model drift and collapse. Since then, AI companies have decided that daily user interactions are a source of clean signal that complements the web . But now that AI agents pretend to be humans, those "user" interactions will just lead to model collapse at a faster rate.

Your comment is pants.

Surely you know that's an absurdly dismissive opinion? North Korea has the capacity to gain access to anything anyone else does, especially if it comes from China.

If Rust didn't encourage copypasta, why didn't they just vibe code those commans wit with claude? I suspect Anthropic would have gladly donated the tokens for a permanent MIT license credit. /s

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

It is similar to the current problem with AI and open source. Which isn't surprising, since the open source movement and Free software especially originated in academic circles. The issue in both cases is that a valuable resource has been created cooperatively, and the mechanism of enforcement of norms is purely social. Hence it is vulnerable to exploitation and sloppification by AI companies, which are deliberately not following any norms.

If someone has a solution, now would be a good time to start developing it. Otherwise I suspect the attacked communities will close off the commons to survive, and we will all be poorer for it.