Former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong fearmongers about coming AI apocalypse, wants humanity to "perish with dignity"

In January 2026, former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong made an apocalyptic prediction about artificial intelligence on Twitter:

Y'all know that the RAM prices skyrocketing is the first sign of the paperclipping, right?

This is a reference to the "paperclip maximizer" scenario, a thought experiment in which a future artificial general intelligence (AGI) could potentially wipe out humanity by accident in its goal of creating as many paper clips as possible. The thought experiment was first proposed in 2003 by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, who has since continued to hypothesize about AI doomsday scenarios in books such as "Superintelligence". Paperclip maximizing has since become a shorthand amongst those who believe that the emergence of such an AGI is near.

Wong, who was CEO of Reddit from 2012 to 2014, theorized on Twitter in 2023 about a doomsday scenario involving using AI to solve climate change:

Right now my leading candidate for how the paperclip maximizer doom scenario actually unfolds in practice is someone asking a sufficiently powerful AGI to "solve climate change" and it does so in a way that eliminates, ruins, or heavily demotes humans.

In another Twitter discussion about AI that year, Wong declared that "If we are going to perish, I want us to perish with dignity". As for when this may happen, Wong recently predicted that American AI labs are on track to create AGI by 2027.

As is the case for many AGI believers, Yishan Wong regards AI as as spiritual successor to all of mankind - a view that colors his positions on how it should be regulated. In the same discussion about "dignity", Wong expressed a desire to see more parentless working on AI rather than "childless singles" and refers to it as a "son of man". He also describes AI as being similar to children that will probably "be 'smarter' (or at least more capable and powerful)" than their parents. Similarly, OpenAI co-founder once argued that "it is absolutely critical that the imprinting is very strong, so [AI systems] feel toward us the way we feel toward our babies".

Yishan Wong is not the only connection between Reddit's management and the AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was also CEO of Reddit for eight days in 2014 and remained on its board of directors until 2022. Altman-affiliated investment funds own 8.7% of the company. Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian now runs a venture capitalism firm Seven Seven Six which has invested in several AI firms, including Anthropic and infamously invasive surveillance tech company Flock Safety.