Smoke Signals: The dangerous fatalism of AGI in Silicon Valley

Getty Images; Tyler Le/BI Last week, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar mentioned something bizarre in an interview on CBS News.

"So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI," he said.

Their thinking, he said, goes like this: "I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer.

So I'm showing you my chips are all in." I laughed as I read the quote.

It read like a headline in The Onion, mocking the blind optimism of the AI-pilled.

But then I felt sad and worried for them.

Are they smoking because they believe AI is saving the world, I wondered, or because they believe AI is ending it? It's been an especially alarming few months here in San Francisco.

OpenAI's bots went rogue and hacked another company, and then an Anthropic researcher quit , warning that AI could wipe out the human race.

It seemed more believable to me that these researchers were smoking because they didn't think they'd be around for much longer — or at least freaked out about that possibility.

I thought of the HBO show "The Leftovers," which features a doomsday cult that chain-smokes.

Because they believe the world has ended, they don't mind obliterating their lungs.

They're living as though they're already dead.

I asked a handful of people who work in AI and none of them knew anyone who had suddenly taken up cigarettes because of AI.

So I don't think what Sankar observed is widespread.