Sam Altman says the stick of uranium in his office is nothing to worry about. Sitting vertically on his desk at OpenAI headquarters in San Francisco like a squat ebony Slim Jim, it is perhaps the most eyebrow-raising among the impressive array of historic innovations he has collected over the years. “That’s depleted,” he says casually of the uranium-238 rod, the same element used to create nuclear energy. “It’s not going to hurt you.” He waves a Geiger counter over it and proves his point.
