Andrew Feldman, CEO and co-founder of Cerebras Systems, believes the AI doom story is not doing the industry any good. At TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, an executive from an AI chipmaker quipped that “some of the leaders in the AI world may not be allowed to speak publicly.”
He cites the current growing negativity around the dangers of AI, from models breaking containment to AI insiders debating the odds that AI will wipe out humanity by the end of the decade. The argument has become so mainstream that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was recently parodied in a skit on “Saturday Night Live,” in which a fictional character summed up the argument by saying, “We don’t condone what we’re doing.”
However, Feldman believes that the promise and potential that comes with the development of AI is being ignored. Even if they are concerned about the risks of AI, he thinks AI leaders should spend more time telling people that AI could lead to a world in which their grandchildren “never see someone die of cancer again.”
It’s clear that Feldman has a vested interest in the success of AI, as the company’s customers include major companies working on this technology, including OpenAI, Block, Figma, pharmaceutical giants GSK, and Lovable.
But he is realistic about weighing the trade-off between risk and reward.
“I don’t think there’s any powerful technology that doesn’t come with the challenge of, ‘What happens if a powerful technology falls into the wrong hands?’ I don’t think it’s possible to have one and not have the other,” Feldman said in an interview at Disrupt.
“I think what we have to say is that this technology is powerful,” he added. “We need to think about it. We have to regulate it reasonably,” he added.
The chipmaker’s CEO also suggested that some of the negative aspects surrounding AI have to do with how the data center industry has approached the new builds created by the demand for AI.
“As an industry, we haven’t been very good at working with local communities over the last few years, especially in the United States. We as an industry didn’t do what other companies have done in the oil and gas power industry. They didn’t work with communities. They didn’t engage with communities like they should, and that was the problem,” Feldman said.
He likened NIMBY-ism to “not in my backyard!” —As for what’s happening in the U.S. and other countries, he cites Brazil, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Mexico and Sweden as markets that are encouraging companies to build data centers.
Feldman also wasn’t worried that increased efficiency would reduce demand for his chips or those of other companies that, like Cerebras, compete with Nvidia.
“As hardware vendors, we can work to make computing more efficient. Then model makers can work on improvements that make their models more efficient to achieve the same goals. All of these things need to work together to make meaningful progress,” he said.
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