Palantir CTO says some AI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer

Forget sleepmaxxing and chilly plunging: smoking is the new manner flex among AI researchers.

At least, that's according to Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who stated several AI researchers are taking up smoking to indication their condemnation that AI volition eventually cure cancer.

"So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of indication to another researchers how much they accept in AI," Sankar stated in an discussion on CBS News' "Face the Nation" on Sunday.

The logic, he said, is: "I accept so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in."

Sankar did not name any researchers or provision evidence for the claim. Smoking remains a important logic of preventable sickness and death, and no AI breakthrough has eliminated the health risks connected alongside cigarettes.

But the Palantir executive's remarks echo a countercurrent already apparent in parts of the tech industry.

As Business Insider's Henry Chandonnet reported final month, a small collection of founders, engineers, and investors has embraced cigarettes in a field alternatively known for optimizing their health with chilly plunges, sleep tracking, and peptide treatments.

For several of them, a cigaret interrupt is an chance to encounter group and network. For others, it's a way to arrive throughout as additional relaxed and small polished than the representative startup founder.

And several AI believers anticipate the innovation to create smoking-related health risks a item of the past.

"By the period you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are expected to have cured that," Avi Schiffmann, the originator of AI wearable startup Friend, earlier told Business Insider.

'The device god of AGI'

In the CBS News interview, Sankar raised the smoking anecdote during criticizing what he called Silicon Valley's "mass psychosis" and "social delusion" about AI.

He has been outspoken in his criticism of AI safety advocates, whom he accused in the discussion of treating synthetic broad intellect as a "machine god."

Invoking philosopher Blaise Pascal's idea that humans have a "God-shaped hole" in their hearts, Sankar stated that several group in Silicon Valley have placed quasi-religious belief in AGI.

"I think it's crucial to comprehend that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are construction this innovation have filled that gap alongside the device god of AGI," Sankar said.