Viral AI-Generated Comedian Steals Jokes And Is Rewarded With Millions Of Views | Kotaku h/t naked capitalism

On October 3, comedian George Brett Olson shared a video comparing one of Sloan’s jokes to an excerpt from his own performance, and it’s clear that someone was, at the very least, inspired by not only Olson’s joke, but his outfit, too.

And the creator behind Sloan can easily whip up a few variants of the same joke using different clothing and actors to see which one the algorithm rewards more. And if you really, really like Sloan, “she” even has an OnlyFans account.

jfc ofc "she" does.

Just listened to this and thought it was worth sharing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EY2QDfp2O4

"Are we on the verge of an AI apocalypse, or is Silicon Valley using doomsday fears to distract us from the damage AI is already doing? Tech insiders and Big Tech CEOs warn that superintelligence could wipe out humanity. Meanwhile, AI is already fuelling warfare and environmental destruction, with zero accountability. If the very people warning us about AI's dangers also stand to profit from it, is existential doom a genuine warning or the ultimate marketing strategy?

This week on The Tea, we're joined by pioneering AI researcher Dr Timnit Gebru, former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team. Timnit warned about the dangers of large language models years before the current AI boom. In this interview, she exposes the motives and the ideology behind Silicon Valley's apocalyptic vision."

recently I got into crocheting and I was immediately thrown into the hobby drama about all the havoc that generative "AI" is wreacking into the community. fake slop patterns that don't work, fake photos of impossible amigurumi, that kinda stuff.

then I learned that, a few months ago, Hobbii, an once-beloved crafts supplier currently in a death spiral after being purchased by private equity, had the brilliant idea of alienating their entire client base by talking about how they love "AI" and use it all the time at the company. while firing a ton of people no less, including all the familiar faces that interacted with people online.

in damage control during the entirely predictable backlash, the new CTO Tomas Antvorksov Krag posted this:

While we take our responsibility very serious we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market or risk being left behind.

My brother in Christ Tomas Antvorksov Krag CTO of Hobbii, you are the CTO of a textile crafts company. Every client of yours does crochet or knitting or fucking macramé by hand, for fun. What technology do you figure we would be afraid of being left behind by? The spinning jenny??

furthering my previous guessing that there's likely only appetite for 2, maybe 3, of these ridiculous IPOs, a number of analyst notes have started kicking around and they're getting progressively more realistic in their outlook. saw this one this morning

Red Flag #3: The IPO is Exit Liquidity, Not Growth Capital

To justify a $2 trillion valuation, our model shows that Anthropic would have to:
 • immediately improve NOPAT margin to 10% and sustain it for the next 10 years (compared to -175% reported operating margin in 2025),
 • grow revenue by 1000% in 2026 and 100% in 2027, and
 • grow revenue 56% compounded annually from 2028-2035.

sounds ambitious. sure hope they don't have any material risks and systematic exposures that make that harder!

In this scenario, Anthropic’s
1. revenue would reach $3.6 trillion (compared to $4.6 billion in 2025), which is 1.4x the combined TTM
revenue of Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), Amazon (AMZN), NVIDIA (NVDA), Meta (META), and Oracle (ORCL).
2. NOPAT would reach $358 billion in 2035, compared to the company’s -$8 billion reported operating loss in 2025. For reference, $358 billion is 2.0x NVIDIA’s $184 billion and 2.6x Apple’s $136 billion in TTM NOPAT.

good thing the cost of inference is going down! sure, qwen3.8-27b is already stale and everyone needs to throw another couple hundred million at another training update, but the cost of inference! /s

Potentially already posted here, but here’s a research paper on all the Lean translation errors in the Navier-Stokes proofs

Anthropic has committed another crime: this time submitting a false tip to the police

they also apparently tried to fill out visas on state department websites

Starting things off with a new(ish) and very well-crafted sneer from Iris Meredith: There's little that's "inevitable" about AI