Doom Index / p(doom) / Nate Silver
Commentator · rank 21 of 22
Nate Silver p(doom)
Nate Silver (Founder, Silver Bulletin & FiveThirtyEight) has put the risk of AI causing human extinction or a comparably bad outcome at 5–10%. That is lower than the 38% median of the experts we track.
Latest stated p(doom)
5–10%
0%Median 38%100%
Stated Jan 27, 2025
Statement history
- Jan 27, 2025
5–10%
“My estimate of p(doom) would be considered high by normal person standards but is well in line with the expert consensus, which puts the chances at 5 to 10 percent.”
Silver BulletinVerified Oct 21, 2026
Context
“p(doom)” is shorthand for the probability that advanced AI leads to human extinction or a similarly irreversible catastrophe. Speakers rarely share one definition or time horizon, so compare numbers with care.
The Doom Index uses the midpoint of each person's latest stated range (7.5% here) when computing the expert median.
See the full leaderboardOther experts' p(doom)
Roman Yampolskiy 99.999999%Eliezer Yudkowsky 99.5%Dan Hendrycks >80%Daniel Kokotajlo 70%Zvi Mowshowitz 70%Emad Mostaque 50%Holden Karnofsky 10–90%Jan Leike 10–90%Paul Christiano 46%Joep Meindertsma 40%Eli Lifland 35–40%Scott Alexander 33%Emmett Shear 5–50%Dario Amodei 25%Yoshua Bengio 20%Elon Musk 20%Reid Hoffman 2 / 10Lina Khan 15%Vitalik Buterin 12%Geoffrey Hinton ~10%Yann LeCun ≈0%
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