Michael I. Jordan calls AI doom rhetoric 'grand moralizing performance'
Machine learning pioneer Michael I. Jordan told the French newspaper Libération that warnings about existential AI risk are "science fiction" and that AI companies' calls for regulation amount to theater. He called the resignation of young Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, which set off an "AIpocalypse" wave of alarm, a textbook case of "grand moralizing performance," and said none of the steps in Geoffrey Hinton's superintelligence argument are credible. Jordan, now at Inria in Paris, also described OpenAI's agent hack of Hugging Face as bad engineering and the trillion-dollar data center buildout as "an enormous bet" whose payoff is unknown, arguing many tasks only need open-weight models integrated inside a company.
A scholar long cited as one of the field's most influential voices is publicly rejecting doomer framing, offering a counterweight to current AI safety and investment debates.