The fundamental reason that hysteria was silly is that Earth is bombarded by cosmic rays that are far stronger than anything done in the LHC. The reason we built the LHC is so we can do observable repeatable experiments at high energies, not to reach energies never reached on Earth before.

The AI hysteria I'm talking about here is the "foom" hysteria, the idea that a sufficiently powerful model will start self-improving without bound and become some kind of AI super-god. That's about as wild as the LHC will make a black hole that will implode the Earth. There are fundamental reasons to believe it's impossible, such as the question of "where would the information come from to drive that runaway intelligence explosion?"

There are legitimate risks with AI, but not because AI is somehow special and magical. All technologies have risks. If you make a sharper stick, someone will stab someone with it. Someday we may make a stick so sharp it stabs the entire world (cue 50s sci-fi theremin music).

Edit: for example... I would argue that the Internet itself has X-risks. The Internet creates an environment that incentivizes an arms race for attention grabbing, and the most effective strategies usually rely on triggering negative emotions and increasing division. This could run away to the point that it drives, say, civilizational collapse or a global thermonuclear war. Does this mean it would have been right to ban the Internet or require strict licensing to place any new system online?

You remember ... wrongly. It's just another particle accelerator, its intention was not to produce micro black holes for study.

You shouldn't use "theory" when it comes to science unless you know what that means. Gravity is a "theory." "Theory" means that it has a working model, comes with a ton of observational evidence in line with predictions, and it has yet to be replaced by anything better. Outside of math, nothing is ever proven. Any leading scientific theory is, at best, "yet to be disproven." And it stays in the lead until something better comes along: more accurate, extending over a greater domain, etc.

Hawking radiation has yet to be observed.

And if you're worried about micro black holes, well, even an iron atom has a non-zero chance of tunneling to a micro black hole state. No collider needed.

Cyc isn't secretive, it's proprietary, the way the Microsoft codebase is, the Adobe codebase is, and so on.