And we all know that CEOs famously never lie or make up “facts” to sell their products.

Has a single researcher come out and backed up this story?

> who just personally bought 37,000 acres of Swedish forest land, presumably in preparation for some form of AI-related geopolitical fallout

Ultra rich guy put some land in his investment portfolio. What a shocker!!

Karp is known for cross-country skiing, so the Swedish forest land is likely related to that and not fallout.

The original quote was from Shyam Sankar, CTO of Palantir, not Karp.

He bought 37,000 acres of forest land because who wouldn't buy 37,000 acres of forest land if they had the means and opportunity to buy 37,000 acres of forest land?

There is literally a link in the article giving the correct attribution and source.

I'm not sure Sweden is where I would try to hide out if the world was ending.

> That's also how politics has worked since (at least) 2015.

You accidentally added 1, 2, and 5.

No need to go to Twitter, you can do that right here.

When a company publicly proclaims "omg, unchecked development will lead to AI destroying humanity!" (or similar), how brave/stupid would an employee have to be to go against the grain & *publicly* proclaim an opposing viewpoint?

Chances are their paycheck requires enough bravery/stupidity that few (if any) dare to deviate from company groupthink too much.

Employee accepts & lives by that long enough, and they might as well be part of a religious cult.

That religious angle could be just similarities in the psychology / group dynamics involved. Same mechanics -> same patterns observed.

It is literally their entire thesis.

They claim AI researchers aren’t saving money in 401k because they believe there will be an AI utopia.

Which researchers? Can you name a few? Is there any proof of this trend?

Heck if anything AI researchers have bigger bank balances than all of us. They’ll be fine for the future no matter what.

Is this parody?

> Jamie, a crypto alum who asked not to share his last name, met a backer for his raw milk startup at a Miami kava bar. The crowd was "50% recovering opioid addicts from Appalachia and 50% Wall Street and Silicon Valley refugees looking for shelter from taxes, pandemic restrictions, and leftist ideological hegemony," he says. A crowd accumulated in the corner, smoking.

> He struck up a conversation with a jacked, Harley-riding investor while chain-smoking Marlboro Reds. Jamie told the investor about his startup, and the two talked about alternative wellness between drags. A week later, the investor signed a check. Smoking poles put him in pole position.

It's all weird but specifically "smoking poles" has a different meaning as far as I'm aware. I can't quickly Google up anyone using "pole" to mean cigarette.

I wish it were more often even generalizing from one case, that would be a big leap in epistemic hygiene compared to the more common generalizing from zero cases!

People love saying this as a gotcha. Please do tell how so.

“The claim isn’t true but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true so I’m going to believe it and further solidify my opinion on the topic” is the exact kind of bias people are talking about.

Why would you not be surprised if the claims are true? Because you have read hundreds of made up stories like this one on internet forums. It’s all a self perpetuating bullshit machine.

> linked in the article (did you read it?), to daringfireball, to a CBS interview with the Anthropic CTO.

Funny that you yourself didn’t click the link to see that it was the Palantir CTO who said it, not Anthropic. The Anthropic part is made up by daringfireball.

> Sankar doesn’t name anyone, alas, but if there’s any truth to this (and good god do I hope there is) it’s got to be Anthropic researchers specifically.

And the CTO isn’t speaking for his company. His own source is “there’s so many interesting stories around this”.

So everyone is reading stuff online and adding another layer to the bullshit, just like you yourself did right now.

> it has created a world where nuclear testing has ended

Or maybe not. China has been credibly accused of starting low-yield nuclear testing in 2020, specifically configured to evade detection, albeit unsuccessfully.

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2026-03/news/us-accuses-chin...

we're also a fresh eight months into there not being a nuclear arms treaty between the two largest nuclear powers for the first time in half a century so who knows what might happen

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/us/snplus/military/2026/02/04/...

Saving the world isn’t a one-and-done job.

There hasn’t been an all-out war between nuclear powers either.

If the odds of all-out nuclear war are, say, one in a million per year, that's pretty good. Seems very likely nuclear weapons would stop being an issue first. Worth it for the era of relative peace they ushered in.

If the odds are one in a hundred per year, then that's awful. We traded periodic bad wars for a nearly inevitable catastrophic war, and people talking about how they haven't been used in warfare since that one time are akin to people talking about how well everything is going while sailing through the air after jumping off a cliff. So far so good!

I don't know what the right number is, but from what I know about how nuclear weapons are managed and what has happened in the past, I bet it's a lot closer to one in a hundred.

What do you mean?

Are you saying he's not accounting for the multi-verse where other worlds killed themselves and we just so happen to survive?

Sure, I think my various hedges that say "so far" acknowledge this. I still think 80 years is a success story given the usual patterns of humanity.

People who have access to classified information are acting like the current Russian nuclear program is not just for show.

I think it was also that logic of 'if we scare senators and thus everyone with the idea of their imminent mortality, this will guarantee massive funding for our military ventures'

see: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/how-pentagons-propa...

You should read up on what this quote from the article is referring to

> From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn't believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust.

The "dark view" that the Soviets had of a nuclear war was essentially that

1. A limited nuclear exchange was impossible due to not being able to ascertain or trust the enemy's intentions and so all parties would use all of their nuclear arsenal to avoid losing the ability to counter attack to any subsequent attacks.

2. Even though they didn't see a nuclear war as being able to cause human extinction they concluded that no nation involved in one or near enough to suffer the second order effects of one would survive.

3. A full nuclear exchange would likely destroy >80% of each nation's industrial capacity resulting in the total collapse of industrial society making any reconstruction efforts impossible and leading to the death of the majority of the population dependent on industrial production for survival. The survivors would be on their own attempting to start over with subsistence agriculture made all the more difficult by however many years of nuclear winter resulted from the burning of cities and industry and suffering high cancer rates from exposure to fallout and toxic soot.

It doesn't really matter how many nuclear weapons you have beyond a certain number. Just imagine if you only hit all of the oil refineries in the US or you only destroyed all the major ports, it would still result in mass starvation and cripple the nation while creating a gigantic ecological disaster from burning huge quantities of oil and material. Multiply that across several nations and it's the end of the world as you know it.

That's because there has only been one Empire depraved enough to use nukes against other human beings in war time.

That Empire was so depraved it dropped those nukes on hospitals and civilians not once, but twice.

But yeah, sure, we need to be worried about OTHER nations, who have never used nukes, right...

That overestimation only lasted a few years. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USA was still nearly untouchable. The Soviets had a small number of rather bad ICBMs, plus a fleet of bombers that would mostly get shot down. That bit in Dr. Strangelove where the general advocates a strike because we'd only "get our hair mussed" with 10-20 million dead was spot on.

A few years later, they had hundreds of ICBMs, plus a good start on a submarine missile fleet. They were able to thoroughly destroy the US by then.

These forces were expensive, but not that expensive. The whole reason the US leaned into nuclear weapons is because it was a lot cheaper to deter the Soviets in Europe with nukes than with conventional forces. An ICBM costs a few million dollars. That's a real bargain for something that will destroy a whole enemy city.

Maybe in the US, but that is illegal in Developed countries.

We’re not all in a race to the bottom.

Yes, it is terrible.

But if you get replaced with a robot that means you are worthless and it's 100% your fault. Should have gone into the trades, stupid.

Now, go support your family as an apprentice ditch digger or starve to death on the streets for your moral failings.

>If the worst is AI kills us

Na, death is a release. Worst is AI keeps you alive forever as a pile of gelatin.

Prepare for the longest game of hide and go seek in recorded history.

Both the worst and best cases seem to require us to do nothing.

I give it 3 years at most, if the progress doesn't dramatically slow down.

I hope the policy measures Anthropic and OpenAI recommend in their research will be implemented in order to disperse the productivity gains enabled by AI widely, like they say.

I'm an optimist, but honestly, I think the dystopian future many pessimists expect is unlikely.

What would be the point for a few rich to concentrate even more wealth? Even if they were so selfish, surely it's worth spending some 20-30% on public benefits to prevent unrest, no?

If there is nothing like UBI to give access to the AI-driven world then won't the 'have nots' fracture into their own subeconomy where they have to work for each other in order to survive, thereby giving them jobs again?

Like AI will give us the solution to global warming: stop burning carbon and releasing methane. Who knew?

Well then, they should stop building it.

The dot com crash was not funny, and even Amazon barely survived to crawl out of a controversial position.

Peoples memories are short, and many assume the past predicts the future. Bulls and Bears alike are always wrong about when events occur. However, Shrek movie releases tend to correlate with market corrections, and there is a new film due out June 2027. =3