Overview

• Associated Press reporting details a marked rise in religious and apocalyptic language from prominent tech figures describing artificial intelligence.
• Geoffrey Hinton, who left Google in 2023 to warn about AI risks, calls the technology “godlike,” while Sam Altman and Peter Thiel invoke a “magic intelligence in the sky” and even the Antichrist.
• Countering dire warnings, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei outlines a near-term vision of curing diseases and reducing poverty, and Ray Kurzweil predicts humans will merge with AI and vastly expand cognitive power by 2045.
• Skeptics such as DAIR researcher Dylan Baker call the rhetoric fantastical and detached from current capabilities, and scholar Robert Geraci points to financial incentives that reward sweeping, prophetic claims.
• MIT’s Max Tegmark, who helped lead a 2023 letter urging a pause on training powerful systems, likens top AI chiefs to competing prophets and cautions against a “pseudoreligious” quest to build an alternative god, as scholars note “apocalypse” historically meant revelation.