THE SMOKING SECTION OF THE SINGULARITY (The Daily Whatever Press) — On Sunday, October 11, Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, went on CBS’s Face the Nation and told Margaret Brennan, on national television, at the hour when your grandparents are watching, that “so many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI.”
Brennan, a professional who has interviewed heads of state, said the only reasonable thing: “What? That makes no sense.”
Sankar explained. The smoker is saying, “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer.” According to Business Insider and Fortune, he added, “So I’m showing you my chips are all in.”
Cough. Cough. Welcome to peak AI madness, I guess?
A trend of zero named people
I want to give Sankar his full due, so here is everything he offered as evidence that AI researchers are lighting up to prove their faith in the robot oncologist: nothing. He named no researchers. Fortune noted it’s unclear how many researchers are actually smoking to project confidence. Gizmodo’s Mike Pearl wrote, “Probably best not to treat this like a real trend.”
What he did offer was a diagnosis. “So there is kind of this mass psychosis, social delusion around it,” he said. He quoted Pascal on the “god-shaped hole” in every heart and said that “many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI.” He called effective altruism “this millenarian doomsday cult meets messianic complex.”
I guess I can’t judge, really. I fill my God-shaped hole with ice cream and other men’s penises, so…
And he announced there are “roughly 2,000 AI researchers in America,” most of them effective altruists, which is a number he also did not source. In case you missed it, an effective altruist is a guy who did the math and discovered the most ethical thing he could possibly do was get rich, and the second most ethical was to explain to you why your food-bank donation was a rounding error against his much larger contribution to society. The children of the year 3000 will thank him for his podcast.
So to recap, a top executive at a company that sells AI to the Pentagon went on Sunday morning TV to warn that the other AI people have joined a cult. The cult’s sacrament is a Marlboro Light, and presumably OpenAI and Anthropic are working on some sick branded lighter and ballcap merch giveaways for every cigarette pack label you scan into an app.
I wrote about P(doom) last month, the number AI builders put on the odds their product ends humanity. I did not have “and they’ve taken up menthols” on my bingo card.
The one guy who actually said it
The closest thing to a real person behind this is Avi Schiffmann, 23, founder of an AI wearable called Friend, who told Business Insider back in September, in a separate story about founders who smoke to network: “By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that.”
He also told them, “Cigarettes are kind of ass, honestly.”
Both things, at once. That’s the Gen Z version of brand loyalty.
Another founder in that same story, Richard Wang of Clad Labs, asked, “What’s more bombastic right now than smoking cigs in the Bay Area?” He smokes about one cigarette a year, according to the piece. One. That’s not a habit, babe. That’s a birthday candle.
Meanwhile, back at Palantir
Here’s a detail Sankar didn’t bring up. In March, Fortune reported that Palantir’s Washington, DC, office has vending machines stocked with free nicotine pouches, from startups called Lucy and Sesh, for employees and guests over 21.
Oh, sweetie.
So the CTO of a company with free nicotine in the break room went on television to say the other guys are using nicotine as a religious signal. That’s Joe Camel calling the Marlboro Man a poser. (Joe got retired in 1997, after the FTC went after R.J. Reynolds for marketing to kids. My generation remembers the sunglasses, and the big dong-shaped nose.)
What actually cures lung cancer
Some real numbers. The CDC says cigarette smoking and secondhand smoke together kill more than 480,000 Americans a year. The American Cancer Society estimates 229,410 new lung cancer cases and 124,990 lung cancer deaths in the United States this year. Lung cancer is still the leading cause of cancer death, roughly one in five.
Cancer death rates are falling. The Annual Report to the Nation, from the CDC, the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society, and the nation’s cancer registries, released September 22, says the drop is driven mainly by “accelerated progress against lung cancer.” Its plan for keeping that going includes further reductions in cigarette smoking.
Not a chatbot. Quitting.
US adult smoking hit an all-time low of 9% in 2025, down from 42% in the mid-1960s. One of the most effective cancer interventions of my lifetime has been millions of boring people putting the pack down.
I lived in Seattle in the 1990s, back when “smoking or non?” was still a thing a hostess asked you and a night out on Capitol Hill sent you home smelling like the Greyhound station. Washington voters banned smoking indoors in 2005. Nobody had to build a god to get there. They just had to vote.
The bet
Here is what the “AI will cure it” smoker is actually doing. He’s taking a guaranteed harm today on the promise that somebody else’s product will clean it up later. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the business model of half the industry. Ship it now; let future software deal with the consequences.
As far as I can tell, there is no AI cancer cure. There are predictions, and plenty of them. A prediction has never once shrunk a tumor.
I don’t know whether Shyam Sankar is right that AI researchers are smoking to prove their faith. Neither does Shyam Sankar.
What I know is that the actual cure for most lung cancer was invented decades ago and it’s free: don’t light the thing up in the first place.
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"I guess I can’t judge, really. I fill my God-shaped hole with ice cream and other men’s penises, so…" 🤣😭
If only more of *them* did, we wouldn't be in this pickle ...
My hubris sense is tingling