Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said on CBS News' Face the Nation that some AI researchers have taken up smoking to signal to peers that they are "all in" on AI, believing it will eventually cure cancer. He named no individuals and offered no evidence for the claim. The remark came during a broader critique in which Sankar described Silicon Valley's AI mood as a "collective hallucination" and a social myth, said some AI safety advocates treat AGI as a near "machine god," and invoked philosopher Blaise Pascal's "God-shaped hole" to describe tech figures redirecting a need for faith onto AGI. The report also notes a counter-trend in a health-obsessed industry, where a few founders, engineers and investors have embraced smoking as social networking or an "unpolished" image.

Palantir·Shyam Sankar·AGI