Palantir CTO: AI Researchers Smoke, Betting AI Will Cure Cancer

Neglect sleepmaxxing and chilly plunging: smoking is the brand new way of life flex amongst AI researchers.

A minimum of, that is in line with Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who mentioned some AI researchers are taking over smoking to sign their perception that AI will eventually cure cancer.

“So many AI researchers have began smoking as a method of signaling to different researchers how a lot they imagine in AI,” Sankar mentioned in an interview on CBS Information’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

The logic, he mentioned, is: “I imagine a lot in AI that it should treatment most cancers. So I am displaying you my chips are all in.”

Sankar didn’t identify any researchers or present proof for the declare. Smoking stays a significant explanation for preventable sickness and loss of life, and no AI breakthrough has eradicated the well being dangers related to cigarettes.

However the Palantir govt’s remarks echo a countercurrent already seen in elements of the tech trade.

As Enterprise Insider’s Henry Chandonnet reported final month, a small group of founders, engineers, and buyers has embraced cigarettes in a sector in any other case recognized for optimizing their well being with chilly plunges, sleep monitoring, and peptide treatments.

For a few of them, a cigarette break is a chance to fulfill individuals and community. For others, it is a strategy to come throughout as extra relaxed and fewer polished than the everyday startup founder.

And a few AI believers anticipate the know-how to make smoking-related well being dangers a factor of the previous.

“By the point you do get lung most cancers, our AI robots are alleged to have cured that,” Avi Schiffmann, the founding father of AI wearable startup Good friend, beforehand instructed Enterprise Insider.

‘The machine god of AGI’

Within the CBS Information interview, Sankar raised the smoking anecdote whereas criticizing what he known as Silicon Valley’s “mass psychosis” and “social delusion” round AI.

He has been outspoken in his criticism of AI safety advocates, whom he accused within the interview of treating synthetic normal intelligence as a “machine god.”

Invoking thinker Blaise Pascal’s concept that people have a “God-shaped gap” of their hearts, Sankar mentioned that some individuals in Silicon Valley have positioned quasi-religious religion in AGI.

“I feel it is vital to grasp that many of those of us in Silicon Valley who’re constructing this know-how have stuffed that gap with the machine god of AGI,” Sankar mentioned.