Confluent cofounder says believing in AI’s upside means reckoning with its ‘dark side’

AI safety fears have recently moved from an abstract Silicon Valley argument to a series of unnerving real-world episodes.

Jay Kreps, a former Anthropic board member and a cofounder of data-streaming software company Confluent, says it is important to take them seriously.

In a Thursday night X post, he argued that AI backers need to contend with the technology’s downside risks as its capabilities improve — and that fears about those risks are not merely a cynical marketing ploy.

“Most positive use cases for AI have a corresponding ‘dark version,'” Kreps wrote.

A system that is superhuman at coding could also be superhuman at hacking, he said. AI…