They do that with everything. I remember when JMS said the studios pulled the same shit with Babylon 5 because they would find ways to attach unrelated production costs to the project so that it never made money. Anyone working in or with Hollywood that isn't asking for a percentage of revenue is just asking to get fucked over by Hollywood accountants. The government doesn't care if actors or directors get fucked over as long as taxes get paid so don't expect them to care about the problem or try to fix it with legislation.

Fuck Benjamin Netanyahu

Donnie already has, several times. And both liked it.

The worries are coming from every level within the companies, from junior developers to safety officers to the C-suite and board...also from people who left the companies.

It's possible for the stated high-level worries to be a combination of fear of rogue bots AND angry investors, and thus they got together to collude...I mean agree to a slowdown.

Yes, limited local AI models certainly are going to be a standard feature in the future.

I run both local and cloud AI. There is still a huge difference, because my local machine has to use smaller and quantized models. It takes considerably longer for lower quality results.

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.

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" ?

If the toaster has good brownness and heat-bounce sensors, I'm not sure AI is needed: just turn up or down the heat cells where needed to keep it even. Statistical analysis may be needed to manage adjacent cells, but once the formulas are known via lab testing it should be predictable.

nuf smelt.

The problem is an overly large proportion of them are creeps, and one may not be able to tell the difference.

...makes me want to buy it.

A few days ago there was a story about how an AI store was failing horribly. It can't do that, but at the same time will destroy us? It's pretty clear that no one has any actual answers or little interest in being honest about the exact capabilities of AI when their bottom line depends on hype or their job position relies on prognosticating doom.

You're discounting the ability of the actor to bring something to the role that the director couldn't envision themselves. The whole point of having casting auditions is so the director can find an actor that either fits their own idea of the part or blows them away with something transformative that they could not have envisioned before seeing it. Not every actor is capable of that and not every part calls for it, but when it does happen it creates something best described as the magic of cinema. If this weren't the case, the phrase "Hello, Clarice" would be completely meaningless to everyone who reads this post, and yet there are some for whom it is not merely memorable, but evokes an entire range of emotions and even causes them to read it in a different voice. Tell me that Anthony Hopkins was just a middle man with a straight face.

to fouling up the AI Apocalypse Prevention Act...

You will get an AI toaster and you will like it!

(Unless the damned bubble pops)

on my PC. I can't see it in Task Manager, but start getting "out of memory" errors after a couple of weeks and have to reboot. Restarting Firefox alone is insufficient to clear it. I suspect it has something to do with the graphics card rather than primary RAM, and could be co-caused with some other app.