Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar has an unusual explanation for why some AI researchers are picking up cigarettes. According to him, lighting up is their way of telling peers just how firmly they believe artificial intelligence will one day cure cancer. Sankar made the remark in a US television interview on Sunday, while arguing that fear-driven narratives are muddying the AI safety debate. He did not name any researchers or offer evidence. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” he said. The smoker’s message, in his words, is: “I’m showing you my chips are all in.”The claim was part of a bigger argument. Citing philosopher Blaise Pascal’s idea that every human has a “god-shaped hole” in their heart, Sankar said many people building this technology in Silicon Valley “have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI.” He called the mood around it a “mass psychosis.”
Shyam Sankar blames effective altruism for AI doomsday fears
Sankar traced much of the AI anxiety to effective altruism, which he described as a “doomsday cult.” Its most famous follower, he noted, is jailed crypto founder Sam Bankman-Fried. By his count, America has roughly 2,000 AI researchers, and most of them share that worldview.So when a researcher like Jacob Coxon warns that AI has a 10% chance of ending humanity, Sankar wants people to treat it as a theological critique rather than a scientific one. He also pointed out that doomsayers once called GPT-2 too dangerous to release and predicted mass unemployment that has not arrived.
Palantir CTO wants existing laws to govern how AI is used
Sankar insisted he is not against guardrails. He wants rules aimed at how AI is applied, with the FDA watching over medicine and the Department of Transportation over transport. His analogy: a defective car is the carmaker’s problem, but driving it into a neighbour’s house is yours.He also noted that some frontier models are now being held back from release, which he said would have been unthinkable a year ago.The smoking claim, for now, rests on his word. A small circle of tech founders and investors has embraced cigarettes, and Avi Schiffmann, founder of AI wearable startup Friend, has said AI should have cured lung cancer by the time smokers get it. Medicine is yet to share that confidence. Smoking remains a leading cause of preventable death worldwide.