A user puts their “P(doom)” at 1e-5 and calls themself an optimist.
A user asks others for their “P(doom)”—the probability that AI will completely wipe us out. They put their own estimate at 1e-5 and say, “Hey, I am an optimist.”
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AI researcher Russ Salakhutdinov posed a question about “P(doom),” which he defined as the probability that AI completely wipes out humanity. His own answer was 1e-5, or 0.001%, followed by: “Hey, I am an optimist.”
Alex Polozov replied with 3e-4, or 0.03%, calling it “obviously the best P(doom), hands down.” Salakhutdinov answered: “Obviously :)” The reply kept the exchange firmly in conversational territory.
Neither post offered a model, time horizon or evidence for the numbers. They are personal estimates, not a study or a consensus forecast. The mathematical gap is still striking: Polozov’s figure is 30 times Salakhutdinov’s, even though both are well below 1%.
Later, researcher Seth Karten proposed a different question: “Forget P(doom). What is your P(success)?” He defined that as the chance that AI and humanity succeed beyond people’s “wildest dreams,” but did not attach a number to it.
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