Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, Says AI Researchers Have Started Smoking Because They’re Convinced AI (Claude, Probably) Is Going to Cure Cancer

From the transcript of Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS: Shyam Sankar: You know, I take — I think there’s a profound truth to Pascal’s saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart, and it’s important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI. And I mean, there’s so many interesting stories around this. Like, for example, so many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signalin