20/09/26
By AfterPost
The man who built Reddit says Big Tech is failing at the most important part of AI — telling the truth.
Reddit co-founder and Seven Seven Six founder Alexis Ohanian told CNBC this week that the tech industry has done a “pretty tone deaf job” explaining artificial intelligence, leaving the public confused, scared, and surrounded by misinformation.
“It frustrates me because I see all this misinformation flying around,” Ohanian said.
And the timing matters. His comments came just days after researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic issued fresh warnings about RSI — recursive self-improvement — the point where AI systems start helping build more advanced AI systems, creating a feedback loop where humans could lose control over how models evolve.
That is not science fiction. That is what labs are seeing right now.
*The Real Risk Is Not Terminator. It’s Banal — And Worse.*
Ohanian said he’s not worried about Skynet — the self-aware AI from Terminator that decides to wipe out humans.
“The risks are real, but they’re more benign, or more banal, than people are thinking,” he told CNBC.
What should we actually worry about? He named two things tech leaders are barely explaining:
*1. Agent Swarms:* Not one super-intelligent AI, but hundreds of smaller AI agents working together to complete a complex task. Think 500 AI assistants booking flights, scraping data, writing code, negotiating prices — all at once, without a human checking each step. One small error multiplies into chaos.
*2. Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI):* AI training better AI. If AI takes over 70% of the training process, humans no longer fully understand why a model makes decisions. Control slips.
Ohanian compared AI to nuclear energy: “Both are powerful scientific advances that can cause serious harm but also deliver major benefits if managed responsibly.”
*Why Silicon Valley Is Losing Trust*
Ohanian admitted the industry itself created the problem.
Instead of clear, thoughtful explanations, we got:
- Doomer tweets from billionaires
- Hype videos saying “AGI next month”
- Political point-scoring in Washington hearings
The result? The public debate is now two extremes: either AI will kill us all tomorrow, or it’s totally harmless. Both are misinformation.
“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’s not alone. Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg said this week: “We can’t let capabilities get ahead of safety.” Mark Zuckerberg is now quietly endorsing parts of Anthropic’s safety framework. And OpenAI, Anthropic and others are reportedly forming a private self-regulatory body — because they know government regulation is coming if they don’t self-explain.
*What This Means For You*
Reddit is the front page of the internet — 100M+ daily users arguing about everything. If Ohanian is right, the next wave of misinformation won’t be humans lying to each other. It will be AI agent swarms flooding feeds, comments, reviews, and elections faster than moderators can react.
The risk isn’t that AI becomes evil. It’s that it becomes so useful, so cheap, and so everywhere that we stop asking how it works.
And that’s a way more boring — and more dangerous — future than Terminator.
Source: CNBC / CNBC Africa