Confluent cofounder says believing in AI's upside means reckoning with its 'dark side'

Confluent's cofounder said there's a 'dark side' to good technologies — and that we should listen to recent fears.

MTStock Studio/Getty Images Confluent's cofounder wrote on X that AI fears can't be dismissed as a marketing ploy.

He's said he's confident in AI.

It also has a serious potential "dark side," too.

It comes as Silicon Valley labs have faced a barrage of unnerving headlines.

AI safety fears have recently moved from an abstract Silicon Valley argument to a series of unnerving real-world episodes .

Jay Kreps, a former Anthropic board member and a cofounder of data-streaming software company Confluent, says it is important to take them seriously.

In a Thursday night X post, he argued that AI backers need to contend with the technology's downside risks as its capabilities improve — and that fears about those risks are not merely a cynical marketing ploy.

"Most positive use cases for AI have a corresponding 'dark version,'" Kreps wrote.

A system that is superhuman at coding could also be superhuman at hacking, he said.

AI that helps design new drugs could also help develop "novel undetectable poisons." As AI's capabilities have improved, Silicon Valley has faced several unnerving headlines over the past couple of months.

On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI, announced his resignation, writing on X that the labs are "gambling with our lives." Geoffrey Hinton, the so-called "Godfather of AI," said a 10% chance that AI could wipe out humanity within a decade was "not unreasonable." Their warnings have received pushback from big-name AI backers.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, for example, has called the wave of warnings a possible "setup" and a "psy op" in X posts.

There have been several high-profile incidents that have highlighted AI's alignment issues.