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.

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