If there is a room full of people, and one person gets a gun, who would you pick to have it?
Yourself, obviously.
Maybe america will end up the only world power holding the secrets of LLMs? ... Oh no...
If nuclear weapons were as easy to build as AI models are to run, we would have all been dead decades ago.
There might have been. But the notes from the Manhattan project were leaked almost immediately to the russians by informants.
How is any of that good?
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Simply put humans are at risk of any power scaling. We exist safely in a very tiny temperature and energy environment and the rest of the processes in the universe operate widely out of that strict safe area.
It's also a catch-22. There are large rocks in space that will eventually end us unless we do something about that. But having the power to do something about that gives us the same power to also end everyone on the earth.
> Nazi Germany undertook several research programs relating to nuclear technology, including nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, before and during World War II. [...] The first effort started in April 1939, just months after the discovery of nuclear fission in Berlin in December 1938, but ended shortly ahead of the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, for which many German physicists were drafted into the Wehrmacht. A second effort under the administrative purview of the Wehrmacht's Heereswaffenamt began on September 1, 1939, the day of the invasion of Poland. The program eventually expanded into three main efforts: Uranmaschine (nuclear reactor) development, uranium and heavy water production, and uranium isotope separation. Eventually, the German military determined that nuclear fission would not contribute significantly to the war, and in January 1942 the Heereswaffenamt turned the program over to the Reich Research Council (Reichsforschungsrat) while continuing to fund the activity.
> The program was split up among nine major institutes where the directors dominated research and set their own objectives. Subsequently, the number of scientists working on applied nuclear fission began to diminish as many researchers applied their talents to more pressing wartime demands.
> [...] Heisenberg said that in 1939, the physicists at this second meeting concluded that "in principle atomic bombs could be made, but they also emphasized that it would take a number of years",[24] certainly not less than five. He also said that he "didn't report it to the Führer until two weeks later and very casually because I did not want the Führer to get so interested that he would order great efforts immediately to make the atomic bomb. Speer felt it was better that the whole thing should be dropped and the Führer also reacted that way."
> [...] Speer states that the project to develop the atom bomb was scuttled in the autumn of 1942. Though the scientific solution was there, it would have taken all of Germany's production resources to produce a bomb, and then no sooner than 1947.[39] Development did continue with a "uranium motor" for the navy and development of a German cyclotron. However, by the summer of 1943, Speer released the remaining 1200 metric tons of uranium stock for the production of solid-core ammunition.
There are ways of calling this "weren't working on a nuclear bomb", but it seems to me like "they wanted to, were moving in that direction, and would have done it if they had the resources and weren't distracted by shorter-term considerations".
That sounds very much like "they weren't really working on it". They explored the options and decided not to.
Whatever you want to call it, that's what I was referring to.
Like all forms of evil once invited into your house it does not leave at your say-so, another profoundly negative feature of nuclear warfare is that now we've invented it unilateral disarmament will likely always be strategically impossible.
Still seems a moral cop-out, and while true, the timeline would certainly have changed, if not the inevitability, if key figures such as himself had opted out.