Machine learning pioneer Michael I. Jordan dismantles AI doom rhetoric as "grand moralizing performance"

Michael I. Jordan dismisses AI doom rhetoric as science fiction and calls data-center spending an unproven bet.

Machine-learning pioneer Michael I. Jordan, now heading a markets-and-learning chair at France's Inria, told Libération that warnings about existential AI threats are science fiction. He described company calls for regulation and high-profile resignations, including Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, as moralizing performance. He criticized Geoffrey Hinton's superintelligence argument, was more favorable toward Yoshua Bengio's safety work, and framed an OpenAI-agent incident involving Hugging Face as bad engineering rather than self-aware agents. He also called massive data-center investment an enormous bet whose payoff is unknown, arguing specialized local knowledge and open-weight models may matter more.