Public opposition to AI and data centers highlighted at Goldman Sachs conference

The public opposition to artificial intelligence and data centers is front and center at the Goldman Sachs Communcacopia + Technology Conference.

CoreWeave CEO Mike Intrator told CNBC's David Faber that companies haven't explained the technology's benefits well enough to the public.

"I don't think we have done a particularly good job of talking about the benefits of what the data centers allow the AI companies to be able to deliver to people, to governments, to decision making," Intrator said in comments that aired Wednesday.

The annual conference brings together leaders across the biggest tech and media companies, and AI adoption — along with the pushback many local communities are showing towards its buildout — is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities, and risks, facing businesses of every kind.

Intrator insisted that the fear around the transformation isn't about data centers, specifically, but is about how fast things are changing.

"It is really about: Hey, you know the world is changing, and it's changing very quickly, and that's going to have impacts on myself. It's going to have impacts on my children, and what is that going to look like? And that is frightening," he added.

As Goldman's conference got underway, another set of comments in the tech world caught attention as an AI researcher quit his job at Anthropic Tuesday, warning the rapidly-evolving technology "could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Jacob Coxon, who worked at both Anthropic and its chief competitor OpenAI, accused the companies of "gambling with our lives" in the race towards AI superintelligence.