Expert takes Oct 11, 2026

This week · interview published October 4

Jordan calls superintelligence sci-fi; he cites no data

Michael I. Jordan of UC Berkeley calls "superintelligence" a science-fiction term, while Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman said on October 10 that it must be contained as an engineering and governance problem. In an interview with the French newspaper Libération, responding to deep-learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton's superintelligence argument, Jordan, one of the founders of statistical machine learning, said: "None of the steps in this argument is credible. Here, we're in the land of science fiction." He sees today's AI as an economic and social phenomenon (English translation of the Libération interview). Suleyman wrote on October 10: "Super Intelligence must be contained... Today, this is an engineering and governance challenge. And it isn't new. We've done it with planes, cars, nuclear materials, food safety, medicines" (Mustafa Suleyman, 2026-10-10). Their premises are opposite: Jordan thinks the argument doesn't hold, while Suleyman treats superintelligence as a real thing to be contained. Jordan was replying to Hinton, not to Suleyman; putting the two side by side is our choice. We read the full English translation of Jordan's interview; its header says Libération published it on October 4. Suleyman didn't say how to contain it, and he has a commercial stake, since Microsoft is currently promoting a "humanist superintelligence" narrative; neither man is reporting a measurement. When a vendor or regulator talks about "containing superintelligence," first work out whether they treat it as something in front of us to be managed or as a premise that doesn't yet hold. Suleyman gave no specifics this time, and a concrete containment method from Microsoft would be the first thing to test the claim against.