Palantir’s CTO, Shyam Sankar, went on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday and made a crack about AI-pilled tech people smoking because they think AI will cure cancer. On its face, it’s the kind of thing a 13-year-old whose uncle “works at Nintendo” would say. But hey, now that he’s said it on TV, maybe it’ll come true.
“Alright I’m going to start smoking now” says probably-kidding-but-maybe-not X user @beep1984 in response to a post about Sankar’s quote.
Another X user, Mohammed Fayaz Salim, sounds like he’s not joking—apparently having smoked before becoming AI-pilled. “This is true for me personally. I have been a lot more cavalier once I realized that pretty much any health condition that you have is going to be solved in the 2030s,” Fayaz Salim writes.
The actual quote from Sankar is meant to be cautionary. Sankar’s larger point is about people having an almost religious obsession with AI, and then he says this:
“Like for example, so many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI. […] ‘I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I will—I’m showing you my chips are all in.’ So there is kind of this mass psychosis social delusion around it.”
His basis for making this claim is not totally clear. He probably does know some AI researchers, and maybe they smoke, and maybe this really is their stated reason. But he could also be drawing on a Business Insider article from last month about smoking in Silicon Valley with the wonderfully tabloid-y headline, “Silicon Smokers: Meet the tech founders who think that cigarettes are their edge.”
That article acknowledges that many Silicon Valley tech workers are enamored with vaping and smokeless nicotine products like Zyn, but a particularly frenzied passage claims:
[…] a strong counterculture is huffing darts. Engineers are chainsmoking to power through coding sprints. Venture capitalists and founders are talking burn rates while burning tar. For some in tech, amid the noise of optimization, smoking has become the new cignal.
In other words, this particular “smoking is back” trend piece (and it’s not the first) claims that cigarettes in Silicon Valley are a productivity hack. But then comes a quote from Avi Schiffmann, who you may remember from past Gizmodo articles as being a guy in the tech world who is very good at getting attention. After talking about his own smoking habit, Schiffmann says, “By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that.”
Anyway, try not to get any stupid ideas from any of this. Not even Grok thinks AI is remotely close to curing cancer.
