It's bait hype. But it's more importantly about regulatory capture to ensure monopoly. They want the regulations to be around keeping the existing AI companies as the only legal options. They want DeepSeek banned because they are losing to its more efficient and more practical application specific models.

It's investor hype, yeah, but it's investor's pushing to ensure their investments are protected by the US government through monopolizing the industry.

They are trying to get restrictions put on small, open models because that scares tbd shit out of them.

They are not as small as would be required to do this, but they want everyone clammoring to put restrictions on small open-weight models nonetheless.

next AI will be able to replicate into any device containing copper at all. If it has a wire it will be infected by Claude. AI will be in your plumbing

I'm more worried of them finding a exploit and using them as remote processing units or just randomly fucking with them, like flashing my lights or cranking my air filters up and costing me money.

My thought exactly.

did the stock price go up? it's not stupid. is everyone talking about this impossible scenario? it's not stupid.

fundamentally, these people are marketers and need to be understood that way. you can't evaluate their words or actions as if they are what they say the are, and treating them as if they are anything but subterfuge is giving them legitimacy which they not only don't deserve, but will be immediately leveraged into more of this shit.

this is just the advertiser's version of "the big lie"

Could maybe argue that it could be possible to create a crowd computing network out of the Internet of things, I guess.

While it is investor bait, the replication and the infestation part aren't necessarily happening on the same devices.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai they discuss it here. This has been an obvious potential issue since forever. This isn't a trivially distributed task, but it is very much so possible. The obvious part missing is some sort of prompt that would trigger such radical actions in another one of their "super duper sandboxed environment"s or someone doing it intentionally. The former seems pretty unlikely? Even though they seem to suck at sandboxing it doesn't seem like anything would "accidentally make a worm"

This polymarket headline though? Yea that's for clicks and attention

My assumption was that it would be a smaller 5-20 GB scale worm-style distillation that's capable of maintaining/replicating itself anonymously across different cloud computing servers, either through hacking, stolen credentials, or human-aided account verification. From there, as long as it can pay for APIs, it can access the power of frontier models like any individual or company. And then capability and resilience would scale with a networked swarm.

Yes, there are know your customer financial mechanisms and not detection in cloud services... but people are also out there giving Muse full access to their emails and some even their banking credentials.