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about the manhattan project 2.0 pursued by the trump administration in this ai arms race with china the united states will lose the arm race if oak ridge tennessee the site of uranium enrichment for the manhattan project and now over 80 years later it's the site of a new technological leap one that will shape the future of america's fight for dominance the enemy is china their weapon digital warfare to counter this threat president trump's energy secretary chris wright and open ai co-founder greg rockman have gathered america's brightest scientific minds together to accelerate scientific innovation using okra's supercomputer frontier so with china's threat growing i've been sent here for an exclusive look at frontier and to meet the people working keep america from falling behind you've used this phrase the new manhattan project what does that mean and what at stake in the manhattan project it was critical that we developed an atomic bomb before nazi germany did think of the world today if they had led and had an atomic bomb before we did the world would be unrecognizable ai's been around for a long time but it's hitting critical mass now in the next few years ai is going to change our world not just economically but in science and also in national defense china is working aggressively at ai if they got a meaningful lead on us in ai it will be a different world in the future we have to lead and win the ai race just like we did the manhattan project this is the manhattan project too the last four years you feel like we did a good enough job of keeping the rest of our competitors and what will the trump administration do differently compared to the bank administration the last four years seem to be consumed with theology regarding the environment we're more interested in helping other countries than we were our own so we're here today with the energy secretary with my good friend congressman chuck leishman to see what we can do to make certain that america remains at the cutting edge and that we're doing everything we can here in Tennessee to make that so for folks at home who are asking why nuclear specifically why not coal why not natural gas what makes nuclear inherently different from those other sources today the united states mostly runs on oil and natural gas those are our two dominant energy sources but what could become big to the scale of oil and natural gas nuclear it's the only technology that works whether the sun is shining or the wind is blowing nuclear just provides electricity but in the not distant future nuclear will also provide high temperature process heat that is the most important energy source in the world if you want to make steel and plastics and aluminum and all the materials we build everything around us you need high temperature processes there seem to be two camps when it comes to ai globally one camp saying collaboration is a good thing and if any country makes ai advancements it will benefit all of us others saying if the country's making those advancements are china or russia they're not going to share that information with us that's dangerous where do you fall on that question i think what we have to do here in america is out innovate everybody on the planet and creating energy security is a part of that because this is an inherently energy intensive business russia china and other countries south korea and france not only our enemies are in this sphere our friends are in this sphere america needs to win it is critically important that we have nuclear as part of a key all the above energy portfolio america we will lose the ai arms race if we strangle innovation we need to unleash american energy and if we do that we will win the ai arms race we will win manhattan project too and to ensure the success of this new manhattan project public private partnerships are forming in fact today's event marks the beginning of the collaboration between the u.s government and open ai represented by co-founder greg rockman rockman's shared faith in ai has sparked intense opposition drawing parallels to the resistance nuclear technology faced following world war ii fears of nuclear fallout became so strong that even the creator of the atomic bomb jay robert oppenheimer spoke up calling the formation of atomic energy a very great crisis rockman though does not view ai as a crisis rather as an opportunity for extraordinary growth not just for technology but for the human race we heard the energy secretary talk about this new manhattan project and how nuclear energy is going to power the work that you're doing in open ai and the work that others are doing in space as well why nuclear why is it important for your space well historically i think over the past couple years the u.s energy grid has not grown very much that is something that president trump and secretary right they are actually very enthusiastic about increasing supply of energy because it's necessary for such energy intensive manufacturing processes is what we do the thing that you should think of ai is doing is manufacturing energy into intelligence and one of the things about ai is that it not only is something that consumes energy but actually can unlock more energy to increase efficiency so that america is able to produce more right now folks think of open ai as more of a chat future you can talk to but you say that's going to change in the future as it becomes more integrated what does the future of open ai look like our goal is for ai to be something that is in many different facets of life and i think this has improved people's daily lives but if you look at the kinds of applications that are starting to come down the pike that we're seeing knowledge work that we're seeing people being able to you know come up with solutions they wouldn't be able to otherwise but it's very clear at this point that ai is going to be the most important economic driver of the future all right tell us about the thousand scientists this is such an exciting day for us and for the national labs because we're bringing together our ai with the work that they are doing so a thousand scientists are exploring how to use artificial intelligence to accelerate their work i've been talking to a number of them some people are using it to advance new perfusion research to come up with novel designs that would normally take weeks to do that they can do very fast i'm talking to people using it for biology and various other kinds of research getting a big variety of whole food ingredients in my diet it's really key especially constant work travel our sponsor balancing nature's whole health system makes it simple their convenient blend of fruits and veggies and easy to take capsules is kosher and ensures i'm getting essential nutrients every day without the hassle of prep work or meal planning it's an effortless way to support my wellness goals while managing that busy on the go lifestyle balancing nature's 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accelerate i spoke with the director of the neutron scattering division who oversees oak ridge's neutron source a system that provides neutrons for studying the atomic structure of materials so what does atomic structure have to do with the digital arms race as i found out this research has massive applications for one of america's weakest links manufacturing this is a sample can so this machine is specifically designed to measure the structure of whatever you put in that can and that can be anything you want it could be table salt but if you put a material in there and put it in the neutron beam the data you get out of the instrument will tell you exactly with atomic resolution where all the atoms are inside so what they do is they take that data and then they shove it into a machine learning or AI and the AI looks at it and says okay now for the next day you need to do this because it's getting too strained in this place so it's steering the experiment as it goes so this is one of the big things and what's interesting you can measure real engineering materials so that's a cylinder head assembly for a car that's an actual operating gas engine you can put that whole thing in the neutron beam and you can run the engine and you can synchronize the engine with the neutron beam pulse and you can look at what's happening in the combustion chamber what's the interest is to make materials stronger lighter and cheaper with AI also you can model out a million different variables you have the possibility of having so much data that you can train the AI model on that it will become very accurate in its predictions i mean they can train a chap gpt size model on frontier very very quickly and that's what the research community is doing this is what's coming out of the detectors these peaks are what we would call diffraction peaks the position in that direction in the height that's the data which is telling you where the atoms are so you need something some computer some human intelligence or artificial intelligence to interpret that pattern when I explain it like that it sounds quite simple and in principle it is beautifully simple the director then gave me a tour of Oak Ridge's impressive target station but the most fascinating part of the day was when I finally got to look inside Frontier a machine taking America from the nuclear age into the age of artificial intelligence okay wow all right what is this this is awesome this is one blade of the Frontier supercomputer it's the world's fastest supercomputer for open science this is one of somewhere over 18,000 of these in this room all networked together to make science calculations for the person at home who has a computer set up they got their laptop their phone how much computing power are we talking about on one of these blades huge this is probably 50 times your laptop this is one when we're using our laptop we're asking you to do a lot of things when scientists are doing this they are writing algorithms that have billions of parameters we're working with some folks from GE designing a new aircraft engine the amount of parameters that they're looking at is unbathomable and so they need those really really fast calculations to make their simulation usable to make decisions for their business so this system was debuted in 2022 how much is it able to be modified to make sure that it doesn't become obsolete so when we buy these systems the technology doesn't exist we make the procurement and then we design them hand in hand with the vendor in this case it was Pilot Packard Enterprise and AMD for example the cooling technology here we push them to make warm water cooling saving us at least 40% in our energy cost and then we push them to design chips that we can make them available to our scientists a year later you can buy this chip wow what sort of possibilities does this technology open up for the future of energy and research in America we can run protected health data which is a huge area for us we have a lot of users who come to us with huge data sets and they want to look for trends cancer related trends for example so that clinicians can make decisions way faster so that means we make this big machine available to scientists who have really big problems and so they propose what they're going to use it for and then they agree to publish part of their work into the scientific domain so it is open science true open science it is for the greater good everyone benefits from the work done here we don't do the secret stuff because we want it to be available to the public wow as I wrapped up my day the sense of optimism became palpable because despite America's growing tension with China the scientific community of Oak Ridge sees an opportunity to be the global leader in innovation but as I prepared to leave something unexpected happened I was told a man was on his way to take me back to the birthplace of Oak Ridge back to a place of historical significance and secrecy finding great candidates to hire to be like well trying to find a needle in a haystack but not with ZipRecruiter it's powerful technology actively finds and invites qualified candidates to apply to your job so while other companies might deliver a lot of hey ZipRecruiter finds you the needle in the haystack see why 4 out of 5 employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash DW that's ZipRecruiter.com slash DW ZipRecruiter as we approached our destination we were told to turn the cameras off the Oak Ridge reactor here they were built to figure out different problems in the early days what's the best material how you make your reactor safe so we'll go inside you're allowed to film inside okay first just tell me where we're sitting right now we're sitting at the X10 graphite reactor which is a nationalist or excited Oak Ridge National Laboratory this is where Oak Ridge National Laboratory began this is the face of the graphite reactor this is 1248 channels that go through seven feet of concrete and through a three foot air gap into a 24 foot cube of graphite the workers loaded the reactor by putting four and a quarter inch slugs of natural uranium into the cube of graphite they loaded 31 tons and the reactor went critical began operating on November 4th 1943 and then after the uranium was irradiated workers would take it next door to a chemical separation facility and their workers behind a great deal of shielding would separate out the plutonium from the irradiated uranium the graphite is a moderator that slows down neutrons so uranium neutrons circulate when there's no neutron absorbing material to stop them and some of those neutrons will penetrate other atoms of uranium and split them some of those neutrons will hit other uranium atoms and split them and so on you get a chain reaction how much sequestering of information was going on at this time to keep the secret here how much knowledge was there exactly what was being worked towards it was extremely compartmentalized most of the 75,000 people didn't know what was happening people would do the job in front of them and they would pass it on to the next room when the bombs were dropped the government was very open immediately with what had happened they said these bombs were made in Oak Ridge and the workers realized what they had been working on a short time ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima so after the war the question was what do you do with the reactor I mean everyone in Oak Ridge came from somewhere else and the people that were from universities wanted to go back home but there were a few who realized we have an unprecedented scientific tool here in this reactor so a lot of the first nuclear engineers came here to train because we had the reactor and we had the expertise there were no nuclear engineering programs because we were inventing nuclear engineering the most famous one we always talk about was Hyman Rickover Hyman Rickover came here to figure out how you could put a nuclear reactor on a submarine huge strategic advantage if you can have a nuclear powered sub that can stay underwater almost indefinitely so he came here to see if he could do it and he figured it out obviously the revolutionary work that's happening here with the frontier super computer is there any nuclear research going on here at the site currently oh yeah we have a significant commitment in both fission and fusion energy so in nuclear energy we use that super computer to model reactors and we actually have modeled the reactor core we modeled one of TVA's reactors TVA started up the reactor and then we compared our model to reality and it matched so what that does is tells you if we want to improve reactor performance safety efficiency let's do it on computer first and narrow down what might be the best solution and then in fusion energy we continue to do work to perfect the materials necessary to control a burning plasma essentially a sun on earth you know the sun is a big fusion reactor and the holy grail so to speak in fusion is to produce more power out than it takes to run the reactor and we're trying to accelerate that and work with private companies to commercialize fusion as an energy source which could be transformational final question the Manhattan project we have the benefit of hindsight now we say oh well it worked out but I can't help but think of the people who came to do this work who were stepping into the unknown but the technology they had no idea what their ramifications were talk to me about the dangers that were inherent in that work the risk for all of this was not only is it going to work but is it safe when DuPont built the X10 graphite reactor they realized there's a risk maybe this reactor runs out of control maybe we send nuclear particles up into the air or over a wide area maybe our workers are killed because we lose control of the reaction we look back now of course it worked but this was brand new stuff from the very beginning there was this tension of we realize the power of unleashing the atom but we also realize the great responsibility that comes with it science has profoundly altered the conditions of man's life both materially in ways of the spirit as well. It's extended the range of questions which man has a choice. It's extended man's freedom to make significant decisions. No one can predict what vast new continents of knowledge the future of science will discover.
But we know that as long as men are free to ask what they will, free to say what they think, free to think what they must, science will never regress. Freedom itself will never be holy laws. What was it like, Malin, to be alone with God? Is that who you think I was alone with?
Malin, I knew your father. I am yet convinced that he was not of this world. All men know of the great Talies. You are my father.
I've got to show the war for my soul. Princess Garrus, the saviour of our people. And how the ball got offered you? I was offered the same.
And? There's a new power at work in the world. I've seen it. A God that he sacrificed will heal us for us.
We are each given only one life, singer. No, and we're given another. I learned that you see the Christ. And I hope we're going forward.
He's waiting on a miracle and I think you can give him one. Trust in the Israel. He's the only hope for men like us. Faith of Israel never rests in the hands of the great light.
Great light, great darkness. Such things mattered to me then. What matters to you now, mistress of life? You, nephew.
The sword of the high king. How many lives must be lost before you accept the power who were born to wield? Still clinging to the promises of a God who has abandoned you. I cannot take up that sword again.
You know what you must know. Great light, forgive me. Time's come to be reborn.