Silicon Valley promised artificial intelligence would fix just about everything.
The people building it believe that pitch more than anybody, and one tech executive went on CBS to show how far that faith goes.
But Greg Gutfeld heard the story and saw a bill coming due.
Palantir’s Tech Chief Says AI Believers Are Lighting Up to Prove a Point
Shyam Sankar serves as chief technology officer at Palantir, the data firm that sells software to the Pentagon and other government agencies. He sat down with Margaret Brennan on CBS’ Face the Nation recently and dropped a line nobody in the studio saw coming.
“So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said.
And Brennan’s reply was exactly one word. “What?”
Sankar then laid out the logic as he understood it. The researchers, in his telling, figure, “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer.” Lighting up, he said, shows everybody their “chips are all in.”
Read that one twice. Grown men with advanced degrees are inhaling the leading cause of preventable death in America because they expect a computer program to bail them out later.
Sankar didn’t name a single researcher. And he didn’t cite a survey either, a gap several outlets that covered the interview made sure to point out. But he isn’t the only one describing the trend. Business Insider reported that a small crowd of founders, engineers, and investors has picked up cigarettes in an industry better known for cold plunges, sleep trackers, and peptide shots.
One startup founder said the quiet part out loud. Avi Schiffmann, who runs the AI wearable company Friend, told Fortune, “By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that.”
Stephen Campbell, a cofounder of Revamp AI, offered Business Insider a more practical defense. “When you’re smoking, you’re networking by accident,” he said.
So there’s the business case. Cancer sticks as a substitute for LinkedIn.
Fox Hung a Warning Label on Silicon Valley’s Newest Vice
Gutfeld and his late-night panel took up the story on Gutfeld!, and Fox News posted the segment under a title that doubles as a warning label: “There will be AI payback.”
That title nails it, and not just for the guys out back of the server farm with a pack of Camels.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ties smoking to roughly one in three cancer deaths in the United States. According to the agency, cigarette smoke carries at least 69 chemicals known to cause cancer. No chatbot has moved either number an inch.
And even the man running one of the biggest AI companies seems tired of the cancer sales pitch. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has conceded that promising AI will cure cancer has become “more a cliche than it is inspiring,” and that only an actual cure would earn the public’s trust.
Silicon Valley Built a Machine God to Fill the Hole Where Faith Used to Be
Here’s the part of the Sankar interview that deserves more attention than the cigarettes.
Sankar reached back to Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century Christian thinker who wrote about a God-shaped hole in every human heart. According to Sankar, a big chunk of Silicon Valley has stuffed that hole with a “machine god” called artificial general intelligence. He labeled the whole atmosphere a “mass psychosis” and a “social delusion.”
He aimed plenty of that fire at the effective altruism movement, the same crowd that gave the world Sam Bankman-Fried, and called it a “millenarian doomsday cult.” In Sankar’s view, one camp expects AI to end humanity while the other expects paradise, and both treat the technology like a religion.
He’s onto something, though he may have shown up late to the revival tent. Christian faith built Western civilization. Strip that faith out of the culture, and people don’t stop worshipping. They just go shopping for a new altar. In Palo Alto, the new altar runs on Nvidia chips and burns more electricity than a small city.
But hold on a second. Sankar sells AI for a living, and Palantir has ridden the boom to become one of Wall Street’s biggest AI winners. A man in his chair has every reason to want the public to fear the doomsayers less and trust the product more. Take the diagnosis seriously. Keep one eye on the salesman.
Working Americans Get Stuck With the Tab for AI’s Gamble
Set the cigarettes aside, and the real story comes into focus.
The same industry that expects a robot to clean up its lungs expects American workers to clean up its mess. Amodei warned in 2025 that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to between 10 and 20 percent within one to five years. He runs an AI company. When he admits his own product could gut a generation of young workers just starting out, folks ought to listen.
International Monetary Fund chief Kristalina Georgieva has warned that AI could hit 40 percent of jobs.
And regular families are paying for the buildout before they ever lose a paycheck. Big Tech keeps dropping massive data centers into rural and red counties, where those facilities gulp down power and water while local ratepayers watch their electric bills climb.
Then comes the question of who holds the leash. The same Silicon Valley giants racing to build AI spent years throttling conservatives over COVID policy, questions about the 2020 election, and January 6. Hand that crowd the most powerful sorting and tracking tool ever invented, and plenty of Americans see a social-credit system waiting to happen, one that could punish the wrong opinion, the wrong purchase, or the wrong church the next time some bureaucrat declares an emergency.
Voters already smell it. A recent poll highlighted by Decrypt found about 45 percent of Americans want the government to restrict how AI gets used and developed.
Blind Faith in a Chatbot Won’t Save Anybody’s Lungs
Nobody can say when, or whether, AI delivers a cure for the cancers smoking causes. Clinical trials alone eat up years. Cigarettes also wreck hearts and lungs in plenty of ways that have nothing to do with tumors.
And that’s the payback the Gutfeld segment hinted at. Silicon Valley wants the whole country to bet its health, its jobs, and its freedom on a promise the industry hasn’t kept yet.
A handful of engineers want to gamble with their own lungs? That’s their call, foolish as it is. But the rest of America never agreed to push its chips onto the table.
Expect stranger rituals as the AI money keeps pouring in, and louder preachers insisting the faithful just need to believe a little harder.
Plenty of Americans still remember when doctors showed up in cigarette ads. They know how that story ended.
Sources: Fox News, “Gutfeld: There will be AI payback”; Business Insider via Yahoo Tech, “Palantir CTO says some AI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer”; Decrypt, “AI Researchers Are Smoking Cigarettes to Prove AI Will Cure Cancer, Says Palantir Exec”; Fortune, “Palantir’s CTO claims AI researchers are smoking to prove they believe AI will cure cancer”; SFist, “Smoking Becomes Trendy In Silicon Valley as Some Researchers Believe AI Will Cure Cancer”; TechSpot, “Some AI researchers are taking up smoking because they believe artificial intelligence will cure cancer”; TheStreet, “Palantir CTO says AI researchers took up smoking to prove a hypothesis”; IBTimes UK, “Some AI Researchers Are Taking Up Smoking as a ‘Flex’”
