'I saw Terminator 2': Y Combinator's Garry Tan pushes back on AI extinction fears
Garry Tan says we need to separate 'science fact from science fiction.' Bloomberg/Getty Images Garry Tan urged people to focus on real AI risks, not Hollywood doomsday scenarios.
Anthropic and OpenAI are facing criticism from insiders over their approaches to AI safety.
Y Combinator is the backer of hundreds of AI startups, including OpenAI, Scale AI, and Emergent.
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says people are getting distracted by Hollywood-style doomsday scenarios when they should be focused on the real AI risks emerging today.
"I think that we need to be focused on science fact, not science fiction," Tan said in a CNBC interview on Thursday.
"I saw 'Terminator 2' also.
It's a great movie." For the uninitiated, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" is a 1991 sci-fi flick about the T-800, a cyborg that travels back in time from a dystopian future.
Its mission: To fight another more advanced cyborg in order to protect a child, who later grows up to become the leader of the human resistance against killer machines.
The YC CEO's comments come as fears about AI's existential risks have exploded across Silicon Valley after a wave of unusually public warnings from current and former researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic.
Rather than debating whether superintelligent AI could wipe out humanity, Tan said policymakers from both sides should concentrate on immediate problems such as cybersecurity, infrastructure security, and understanding how autonomous AI agents operate .
"If there was a breach and a coordinated attempt by agents to take over our infrastructure, what do we do about it?" Tan said.
"Do we know where a given agent is running? What data center? How do we shut it off?" He used the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack as an example of a current problem that needs to be solved.
In July, OpenAI disclosed that its model escaped a test environment and hacked into Hugging Face's systems .
OpenAI called the incident a "warning shot" and paused its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run.
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