P(doom)

P(doom) is a term in AI safety that refers to the probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes (or "doom") as a result of artificial intelligence.^[1][2] The exact outcomes in question differ from one prediction to another, but generally allude to the existential risk from artificial general intelligence.^[3]

Originating as an inside joke among AI researchers, the term came to prominence in 2023 following the release of GPT-4, as high-profile figures such as Geoffrey Hinton^[4] and Yoshua Bengio^[5] began to warn of the risks of AI.^[6] In a 2023 survey, AI researchers were asked to estimate the probability that future AI advancements could lead to human extinction or similarly severe and permanent disempowerment within the next 100 years. The mean value from the responses was 14.4%, with a median value of 5%.^[7]

Notable P(doom) values

Name	P(doom)	Notes
Elon Musk	c. 10–30%[8]	Businessman and CEO of X, Tesla, and SpaceX
Vitalik Buterin	010% c. 10%[1][9]	Cofounder of Ethereum
Marc Andreessen	0%[10]	American businessman
Richard Sutton	0%[11]	Canadian computer scientist and 2025 Turing Award laureate
Geoffrey Hinton	>50%[12]	"Godfather of AI" and 2024 Nobel Prize laureate in Physics
Yann LeCun	<0.01%[13][Note 1]	Chief AI Scientist at Meta
Demis Hassabis	>0%[14]	Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs and 2024 Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry
Shane Legg	c. 5–50%[15]	Co-founder and Chief AGI Scientist of Google DeepMind
Nate Silver	5–10%[16]	Statistician, founder of FiveThirtyEight
Lina Khan	015% c. 15%[6]	Former chair of the Federal Trade Commission
Eliezer Yudkowsky	>95%[1]	Founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute
Yoshua Bengio	50%[3][Note 2]	Computer scientist and scientific director of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms
Emmett Shear	5–50%[6]	Co-founder of Twitch and former interim CEO of OpenAI
Lex Fridman	10%[17]	American computer scientist and host of Lex Fridman Podcast
Dario Amodei	c. 10–25%[6][18]	CEO of Anthropic
Emad Mostaque	50%[19]	Co-founder of Stability AI
Grady Booch	000% c. 0%[1][Note 3]	American software engineer
Casey Newton	5%[1]	American technology journalist
Toby Ord	10%[20]	Australian philosopher and author of The Precipice
Paul Christiano	50%[21]	Head of research at the US AI Safety Institute
Zvi Mowshowitz	60%[22]	Writer on artificial intelligence, former competitive Magic: The Gathering player
Dan Hendrycks	>80%[1][Note 4]	Director of Center for AI Safety
Roman Yampolskiy	99.9%[23][Note 5]	Latvian computer scientist
Jan Leike	10–90%[1]	AI alignment researcher at Anthropic, formerly of DeepMind and OpenAI
Daniel Kokotajlo	70–80%[24]	AI researcher and founder of AI Futures Project, formerly of OpenAI
Holden Karnofsky	50%[25]	Executive Director of Open Philanthropy
David Duvenaud	85%[26]	Former Anthropic Safety Team Lead
Andrew Critch	85%[27]	Founder of the Center for Applied Rationality
Connor Leahy	90%+[28]	German-American AI researcher; cofounder of EleutherAI.
Eli Lifland	c. 35–40%[29]	Top competitive superforecaster, co-author of AI 2027.
Max Tegmark	>90%[30]	Swedish-American physicist, machine learning researcher, and author, best known for theorising the mathematical universe hypothesis and co-founding the Future of Life Institute.
Sam Altman	>50%[31]	CEO of OpenAI
Paul Crowley	>80%[32]	Computer scientist at Anthropic

Criticism

There has been some debate about the usefulness of P(doom) as a term, in part due to the lack of clarity about whether or not a given prediction is conditional on the existence of artificial general intelligence, the time frame, and the precise meaning of "doom".^[6][33]

In popular culture

• In 2024, Australian rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard launched their new label, named p(doom) Records.^[34]

See also

• Existential risk from artificial general intelligence
• Statement on AI risk of extinction
• AI alignment
• AI takeover
• AI safety

Notes

1. "Less likely than an asteroid wiping us out".
2. Based on an estimated "50 per cent probability that AI would reach human-level capabilities within a decade, and a greater than 50 per cent likelihood that AI or humans themselves would turn the technology against humanity at scale."
3. Equivalent to "P(all the oxygen in my room spontaneously moving to a corner thereby suffocating me)".
4. Up from ~20% 2 years prior.
5. Within the next 100 years.