Lighting up is their way of telling peers just how firmly they believe artificial intelligence will one day cure cancer, according to him. “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.”
Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar has an unusual explanation for why some AI researchers are picking up cigarettes. He did not name any researchers or offer evidence. Sankar made the remark in a US television interview on Sunday, while arguing that fear-driven narratives are muddying the AI safety debate.
He also pointed out that doomsayers once called GPT-2 too dangerous to release and predicted mass unemployment that has not arrived.
He also noted that some frontier models are now being held back from release, which he said would have been unthinkable a year ago.