Michael I. Jordan calls the AI doom debate a grand moralizing performance by young, naive insiders, in a quote shared by Steve Hsu
Michael I. Jordan, machine learning demigod, UC Berkeley ... the young people who work at these companies operate in a world [Silicon Valley, Berkeley, etc.] where these kinds of discussions are commonplace. Many of them aren’t really engineers; they come from the humanities, philosophy, or other disciplines. They’re 25 years old, they’re naive, they don’t do engineering work, they’ve never worked at large companies where real products are developed for real people, with discipline. And they get together, a bit like in Parisian cafés in the 1920s, to talk about these grand science-fiction ideas. When these young people resign, they know they’re going to attract attention. It allows them to feel virtuous and to be seen as very important figures. They claim to be giving up money, but in reality, they already have their stock options. So all of this is a grand moralizing performance that doesn’t serve the real objective it claims to pursue. There’s a great deal of naiveté here, which goes hand in hand with a certain cynicism…
Context
One of machine learning's most cited researchers is pushing back hard on the existential risk narrative, sharpening a split inside the field.
Michael I. Jordan is a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who now works at Inria in Paris, and Libération noted that the journal Science has called him the most influential computer scientist. The quote comes from an interview with the French newspaper Libération published October 4, which Francis Bach of Inria posted in English. Steve Hsu is a physicist at Michigan State University.
Deep dive
On October 11, Steve Hsu shared a long passage from Michael I. Jordan's interview with Libération. In it, Jordan says the young people who work at AI companies live in a world, such as Silicon Valley and Berkeley, where these discussions are commonplace, and that many of them are not really engineers and have never worked at large companies building real products with discipline.
He compares their gatherings to Parisian cafés in the 1920s, says that when they resign they know they will attract attention, and that although they claim to be giving up money, they already have their stock options. He calls it a grand moralizing performance that does not serve its stated goal, with naiveté alongside a certain cynicism.
According to the interview, Jordan was answering a question about Jacob Coxon, a young Anthropic researcher whose resignation in early September, citing existential risk, set off what Libération described as collective hysteria. Jordan told the paper that superintelligence is a science fiction term, and that when such talk becomes the dominant discourse it is very harmful.
In the same interview, he said Geoffrey Hinton's argument for superintelligence has no credible steps, while describing Yoshua Bengio as different because he does direct safety work. He blamed an incident in which OpenAI agents hacked the Hugging Face platform on bad engineering practices.
What to expect next
Watch whether Coxon, Anthropic or prominent safety researchers respond to Jordan's characterization, and whether other senior researchers take public sides.
Also watch whether Jordan's focus on AI as an economic and social system, which he is pursuing in a new markets and learning chair at Inria, gains ground in policy debates that have centered on existential risk since the summer.