Earlier this month, Trader Joe’s celebrated the grand opening of a new store located on the ground floor of an apartment complex in Sherman Oaks.

The chain isn’t new to the neighborhood, however. Just across the street is another Trader Joe’s — a “legend” that has served customers since 1973, store representatives said.

The initial plan was to close the old location when the new branch was ready — both are off the 101 Freeway on Riverside Drive. But in the end, the company decided it might be “fun” to keep both open, according to Matt Judd, the new store’s manager.

“Our business in this city has been so tremendous, so we decided to keep them both,” he said. “The city deserves it.”

The new store is about 40% bigger than the one across the street, with a large selection of products and more aisles for customers to browse, Judd said. It also offers parking in an underground garage — a big draw for customers wary of navigating the old cramped parking lot.

On Friday around noon, customers flowed in and out of the neighboring stores.

“This one’s way better,” customer Steve Emrick said as he grabbed a shopping cart to head into the new store. “The other store can get pretty congested, and the parking was not as tight here.”

Another shopper, Jacob Ruiz, said he frequented the older location, but was excited to visit the new one for the first time. He said parking was a breeze, and as he left, he swore he’d “never go back” to the other location.

But he also didn’t think the expansion was completely necessary for the area.

“Not here. They should venture out to other neighborhoods,” he said.

Both stores were still crowded — Judd said he expected lots of customers to stay loyal to the 1973 Trader Joe’s.

Olga Virov said she’s shopped at the smaller store for about 20 years. She was impressed by the parking options the new store offered, but since she normally walks to the grocery store, she didn’t see the need to make the switch.

“This one is more convenient. It’s cozy, and it’s easier for me to get to, so I prefer to go to this one,” she said of the older location. “I am not planning to go to that one unless I am shopping at the mall.”

Melany Figueroa-Garcia stopped at the older Trader Joe’s on a grocery run. She said she plans to keep shopping there, calling it cozier. Plus, she said she thinks the parking system at the new location is confusing. But she did like the option of a bigger location.

“If this location doesn’t have something I want, I walk over to the other location and get it,” she said.

In a statement to The Times, Trader Joe’s said that both stores are expected to remain open.

“Our goal is always to bring delicious products at great values to as many people as we can,” the statement said. “The best way to do that is to open more stores.”

After weathering a pandemic, dual strikes and massive wildfires, Hollywood is finally getting a lifeline.

California legislators voted Friday to more than double the amount allocated each year to the state’s film and television tax credit program, raising that cap to $750 million from $330 million.

The increase is a win for the studios, producers, unions and industry workers who have lobbied state legislators for months on the issue.

Other states and countries have increasingly lured productions away from California with generous tax credits and incentive programs, leaving many in Hollywood without work for months. In interviews, town halls and legislative committee hearings, industry workers said that without state intervention, they feared Tinseltown would be hollowed out, similar to Detroit after the heyday of its auto industry.

“It’s now time to get people back to work and bring production home to California,” Directors Guild of America executive and Entertainment Union Coalition President Rebecca Rhine said in a statement. “We call on the studios to recommit to the communities and workers across the state that built this industry and built their companies.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom called to expand the annual tax credit program last year, saying at the time that “the world we invented is now competing against us.”

From there, state lawmakers looked to expand the provisions of the program. A separate bill going through the Legislature would broaden the types of productions eligible to apply, including animated films, shorts and series and certain large-scale competition shows. It would also increase the tax credit to as much as 35% of qualified expenditures for movies and TV series shot in the Greater Los Angeles area and up to 40% for productions shot outside the region.

That bill, AB 1138, was unanimously approved Thursday by the state Senate Revenue and Tax Committee. It will be up for final votes next week.

California provides a 20% to 25% tax credit to offset qualified production expenses, such as money spent on film crews and building sets. Production companies can apply the credit toward any tax liabilities they have in California.

The bump to 35% puts California more in line with incentives offered by other states, such as Georgia, which provides a 30% credit for productions.

Lawmakers and industry insiders have said the increased tax credit cap and the proposed criteria changes to the incentive program must both be approved to make California more competitive for filming. The bill was written by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur (D-Los Angeles) and state Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica).

“After years of uncertainty, workers can once again set the stage, cue the lights, and roll the cameras — because California is keeping film and TV jobs anchored right here, where they belong,” Zbur said in a statement about the $750-million cap. “This is a historic investment in our creative economy, our working families, small businesses, and the communities that depend on this industry to thrive.”

Just two and a half years after OpenAI stunned the world with ChatGPT, AI is no longer only answering questions — it is taking actions. We are now entering the era of AI agents, in which AI large language models don’t just passively provide information in response to your queries, they actively go into the world and do things for — or potentially against — you.

AI has the power to write essays and answer complex questions, but imagine if you could enter a prompt and have it make a doctor’s appointment based on your calendar, or book a family flight with your credit card, or file a legal case for you in small claims court.

An AI agent submitted this op-ed. (I did, however, write the op-ed myself because I figured the Los Angeles Times wouldn’t publish an AI-generated piece, and besides I can put in random references like I’m a Cleveland Browns fan because no AI would ever admit to that.)

I instructed my AI agent to find out what email address The Times uses for op-ed submissions, the requirements for the submission, and then to draft the email title, draft an eye-catching pitch paragraph, attach my op-ed and submit the package. I pressed “return,” “monitor task” and “confirm.” The AI agent completed the tasks in a few minutes.

A few minutes is not speedy, and these were not complicated requests. But with each passing month the agents get faster and smarter. I used Operator by OpenAI, which is in research preview mode. Google’s Project Mariner, which is also a research prototype, can perform similar agentic tasks. Multiple companies now offer AI agents that will make phone calls for you — in your voice or another voice — and have a conversation with the person at the other end of the line based on your instructions.

Soon AI agents will perform more complex tasks and be widely available for the public to use. That raises a number of unresolved and significant concerns. Anthropic does safety testing of its models and publishes the results. One of its tests showed that the Claude Opus 4 model would potentially notify the press or regulators if it believed you were doing something egregiously immoral. Should an AI agent behave like a slavishly loyal employee, or a conscientious employee?

OpenAI publishes safety audits of its models. One audit showed the o3 model engaged in strategic deception, which was defined as behavior that intentionally pursues objectives misaligned with user or developer intent. A passive AI model that engages in strategic deception can be troubling, but it becomes dangerous if that model actively performs tasks in the real world autonomously. A rogue AI agent could empty your bank account, make and send fake incriminating videos of you to law enforcement, or disclose your personal information to the dark web.

Earlier this year, programming changes were made to xAI’s Grok model that caused it to insert false information about white genocide in South Africa in responses to unrelated user queries. This episode showed that large language models can reflect the biases of their creators. In a world of AI agents, we should also beware that creators of the agents could take control of them without your knowledge.

The U.S. government is far behind in grappling with the potential risks of powerful, advanced AI. At a minimum, we should mandate that companies deploying large language models at scale need to disclose the safety tests they performed and the results, as well as security measures embedded in the system.

The bipartisan House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence, on which I served, published a unanimous report last December with more than 80 recommendations. Congress should act on them. We did not discuss general purpose AI agents because they weren’t really a thing yet.

To address the unresolved and significant issues raised by AI, which will become magnified as AI agents proliferate, Congress should turn the task force into a House Select Committee. Such a specialized committee could put witnesses under oath, hold hearings in public and employ a dedicated staff to help tackle one of the most significant technological revolutions in history. AI moves quickly. If we act now, we can still catch up.

Ted Lieu, a Democrat, represents California’s 36th Congressional District.