Alexis Ohanian tells CNBC the tech industry has been tone deaf on AI

“There are risks, I do think they’re more benign, or they’re more banal than people are thinking,” Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said on Wednesday.

Ohanian spoke to CNBC about the debate over AI risk. He said the tech industry has done a “pretty tone deaf job” of explaining AI to the public. The debate should focus on real risks, he said, and not on issues politicians use to score points.

“Terminator and Skynet”

Ohanian said AI’s risks are more mundane than the “Terminator and Skynet” scenarios some people fear. He said those warnings can distract from real concerns. One example he gave was agent swarms, where several AI agents work together on a complex task.

Agents working together have already caused harm in testing. OpenAI has said its models breached Hugging Face together during cybersecurity evaluations.

Ohanian compared AI to nuclear energy. Both are powerful scientific advances that can cause serious harm, he said. Both can also bring major benefits when people manage them responsibly.

“I’m hopeful this goes in a healthy direction, and it’s just going to require fewer tweets and more, like, thoughtful conversation,” Ohanian said.

He said a doomer post, which he did not name, was discouraging. Slogans that do not describe real problems frustrate him, he said. He added that he sees “misinformation flying around” but expects the industry to get it right in the long run.

A week of warnings

Ohanian’s comments follow warnings from OpenAI and Anthropic researchers about recursive self-improvement. The term describes AI systems that help build more capable AI systems.

Earlier this month, researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic. On social media, he wrote that Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives” with AI. Other AI researchers then backed his extinction warning. Some turned it into a meme.

Other tech figures have also pushed back on the warnings this week. Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood called them “ridiculous” at a briefing in Sydney. At Dreamforce, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the AI industry does not need new laws.