OpenAI Co-Founder's Doomsday Bunker Plan for AGI Apocalypse Revealed

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever once proposed building a doomsday bunker that could protect the company’s top researchers in case of an end-of-the-world “rapture” triggered by the release of a new form of artificial intelligence (AI), popularly referred to as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), capable of surpassing the cognitive abilities of humans.

The revelation has been made by Karen Hao in her upcoming book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI. Mr Sutskever, long regarded as the brains behind ChatGPT, made the comment during a meeting with key scientists at the company in 2023.

“Once we all get into the bunker…” said Mr Sutskever, only to be interrupted by a confused colleague: “I’m sorry, the bunker?”

To which he replied: “We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI.”

As per the book’s excerpts, published in The Atlantic, it wasn’t the first and only time that Mr Sutskever broached the topic. Two other sources told Ms Hao that Mr Sutskever regularly referenced the bunker in internal discussions.

Society not ready for AGI

This is not the first instance when a top-level executive, working to build AI models, has sounded the alarm about the future of AGI. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has already warned that society is not ready for AGI.

“I think we are on the cusp of that. Maybe we are five to 10 years out. Some people say shorter, I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Mr Hassabis when quizzed about the timeline of AGI becoming a reality.

“It’s a sort of like probability distribution. But it’s coming, either way it’s coming very soon and I’m not sure society’s quite ready for that yet. And we need to think that through and also think about these issues that I talked about earlier, to do with the controllability of these systems and also the access to these systems and ensuring that all goes well,” he added.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner has previously called for the establishment of a UN-like umbrella organisation to oversee AGI’s development.

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What is AGI?

AGI takes AI a step further. While AI is task-specific, AGI aims to possess intelligence that can be applied across a wide range of tasks, similar to human intelligence. In essence, AGI would be a machine with the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge in diverse domains, much like a human being.