☢️ Last May, OpenAI representatives showed up at Los Alamos National Laboratory with armed security escorts and locked metal briefcases. Inside: the model weights for ChatGPT o3, which they then installed on Venado, one of the most powerful supercomputers on earth. By August, Venado was moved onto a classified network with access to nuclear weapons data. 🤖 Let that sit for a second. 😳 A quote from a researcher who's been in nuclear testing since the 1980s: "We're doing calculations I could only dream of doing before." The implication being that AI isn't just a productivity tool at Los Alamos. It's changing what questions they can even ask.

🧠 Scientists there are using AI to simulate how weapons respond to stress without live detonation tests, which the US hasn't conducted since 1992. Eighty years of nuclear test data is now training data.

⚡ The $320M Genesis Mission program aims to double the productivity of American science within a decade. That's the stated goal. Across 17 national labs.

🤔 From LANL's computational sciences chief: "For the very first time, I would argue, on a really big scale, we find ourselves not in a leadership role here." The government, for once, is chasing the private sector. Not directing it.

We spend a lot of time debating AI safety in the abstract. Meanwhile, the actual story is already written, locked in a briefcase, and installed on a classified network in the New Mexico desert.

https://www.vox.com/technology/484250/los-alamos-nuclear-ai-openai-chatgpt
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