Mark Cuban says he's way more worried about AI backlash than an AI apocalypse

Mark Cuban says the greater threat to humanity isn’t an AI apocalypse, but how people might react to doomsday warnings.

The tech billionaire wrote late Monday on X that he sees a “far greater risk from what humans do in response to what they see on social media, than what agent swarms will do.” Cuban said in another post that he was “more concerned about how humans will react” than the actual dangers of AI, and that he didn’t believe stopping development would even be possible.

He was responding to fresh worries about AI eliminating all humans, after several researchers voiced that concern, and AI leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei said they supported a slowdown in development to keep risks in check.

Cuban, a former “Shark Tank” investor, wrote in another post that he sees social media algorithms “amplifying the anti AI sentiment far beyond any positive AI sentiment.” He pointed out the irony of Meta and Alphabet, both of which own social media platforms and AI models, potentially “pushing people to hate AI, to subsidize their AI.” Which will lead to the ultimate irony.

The frontier labs, without social media platforms, have the most powerful AI.

But it’s not powerful enough to reverse engineer the social media algorithms and push content viral for their own AI agenda.

Literally, I think there is far… https://t.co/2sP45ylMJ6 Cuban added that the “ultimate irony” is that frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic have the best AI models, but they’re “not powerful enough to reverse engineer the social media algorithms and push content viral for their own AI agenda.” The business mogul, who sold his Internet radio startup to Yahoo during the dot-com bubble, questioned in other X posts this week whether the climate crisis poses a greater threat to humanity than AI, given the deaths and species extinctions it has already caused.

Cuban has publicly taken a measured tone on AI, saying that current models are worse than humans at understanding consequences and “reading the room.” He’s also raised the alarm on the AI industry’s deep reliance on Nvidia, calling it “truly scary” that it “all could crumble” if the AI chipmaker disappoints.

Michael Burry, the investor of “The Big Short” fame, has similarly said there’s “nothing to fear” about improved AI chatbots, and calls for a slowdown are “self-serving.”