When OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever talked about artificial general intelligence, or AGI, he didn’t sound like a guy earnestly building smarter chatbots for the betterment of humanity. He sounded like a guy bracing for a Judgment Day he was helping to usher in.
According to reporting by The Atlantic’s Karen Hao, who’s writing a book on the November 2023 boardroom fiasco that briefly ousted CEO Sam Altman, Sutskever seems to be simultaneously developing supremely intelligent AI while also preparing for the end times.
In one surreal 2023 meeting, he casually declared, “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI.” When a researcher asked if he was serious, he doubled down, but tried to smooth over how bonkers he sounded by suggesting that entry into the bunker would, of course, be optional.
Not everyone needs to enter the Vault Tec vaults, but if you want to survive a nuclear apocalypse and the super mutants that follow, it’s suggested that you enter and never leave.
Openai’s Top Scientists Wanted to ‘Build a Bunker’ Before Releasing Agi
Sutskever wasn’t alone in his beliefs. Some insiders described his mindset as bordering on the prophetic. “There is a group of people—Ilya being one of them—who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture,” one source told Hao. That’s not metaphorical. They mean a literal rapture.
The scientist who once suggested some AI models might be “slightly conscious” seemed to be losing faith in OpenAI’s direction, even as he remained devoted to the technology. His apocalyptic conviction that AGI could end life as we know it, unless it was in the right hands, at least partially influenced his decision to join the coup against Altman. As we all know by now, it failed.
The move failed. That moment of high drama is now called “The Blip” by folks on the inside, possibly a reference to what characters within the Marvel Cinematic Universe called the effects of the Thanos snap. Altman is still in power, probably more powerful than before, and Sutskever has departed Open.Ai.
At least he’ll always have his bunker.
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