Sam Altman compared the scale of OpenAI with the Manhattan Project and quoted Oppenheimer in 2019, report says

Sam Altman and Robert Oppenheimer, pointing to a picture of a mushroom cloud.

JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images; Bettmann/Getty Images

• Sam Altman compared OpenAI's ambitions with the scale of the Manhattan Project in 2019, per the NYT.
• He paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer with his belief that AI must progress despite the risks.
• "Am I doing something good? Or really bad?" the CEO reportedly said.

Open AI CEO Sam Altman previously compared the scale of his company to the Manhattan Project – codename for the US government's project to produce the first nuclear bomb in World War II, per The New York Times. 

Days after Microsoft pledged to invest $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, Altman reportedly told Times technology reporter Cade Metz that the World War II nuclear weapons program was a "project on the scale of OpenAI – the level of ambition we aspire to."

According to Metz, Altman also paraphrased the Manhattan Project's leader, Robert Oppenheimer, in a 1945 speech in which he justified creating the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a necessary expansion of human knowledge.

"Technology happens because it is possible," Altman reportedly said, adding that he and Oppenheimer shared the same April 22 birthday, per The Times. 

OpenAI's primary goal is to achieve artificial general intelligence or AGI – the point at which AI becomes as capable as humans – and to do it safely, per a February blog post. 

But the company's rapid progress – upgrading to the more powerful GPT-4 four months after ChatGPT's public release – has caused concern.

36% of respondents to a New York University survey said they feared the technology could lead to "nuclear-level catastrophe," while researchers have said that AI "does not care for us nor sentient life in general."

A Goldman Sachs report published last week suggested that AI could impact 300 million full-time jobs, with it already being used to write cover letters, children's books, and help students cheat on essays.

Altman cautioned that AGI would come with a "serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption" in the February blog post. In the 2019 conversation with Metz, he also reportedly questioned: "Am I doing something good? Or really bad?"

He further detailed his beliefs in this blog post, saying: "Because the upside of AGI is so great, we do not believe it is possible or desirable for society to stop its development forever; instead, society and the developers of AGI have to figure out how to get it right."

Altman told the Wall Street Journal that he wants a universal basic income to compensate jobs that are replaced by AI, letting people pursue more creative work. He also sits on a joint safety board alongside Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, which has the ability to roll back any product releases if they are deemed too dangerous, per the Journal. 

OpenAI saw renewed criticism last week as more than 1,000 people – including AI experts, Elon Musk, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak – signed an open letter calling for the technology's development to be paused for six months due to rapid progress. 

"Recent months have seen AI labs locked in an out-of-control race to develop and deploy ever more powerful digital minds that no one – not even their creators – can understand, predict, or reliably control," the letter said. 

Last Friday, Italy's national data protection agency announced that it was blocking access to ChatGPT and investigating OpenAI. It cited a data breach, and its use of personal data to train the chatbot's algorithm.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, sent outside normal working hours. 

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