A reporting trip to Los Alamos National Laboratory to see how they're integrating AI into nuclear research.
This is an edition of Field Notes, a behind-the-scenes at how one of our journalists reports out a story on location. They detail their trip in a timestamped diary format and take you along with them as they report their story. This article originally appeared in the Vox Explainer, our members-only newsletter about how we make our journalism.
Today, we have an edition of Field Notes, a reporter’s log from senior correspondent Josh Keating. He recently took a trip to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico report on how AI is impacting research at the lab.
Hi Vox Members,
I’m Joshua Keating, a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and national security. This year, I’m also a fellow at the Outrider Foundation, writing a series of articles on the intersection of AI and nuclear weapons.
In January, I had the opportunity to visit the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to report on how AI is impacting research at the lab. In particular, I was interested in the lab’s recently announced partnership with OpenAI, which resulted in them installing ChatGPT on Venado, a supercomputer with access to some of the country’s most sensitive nuclear weapons data. Also, given the frequent comparisons between AI and the early days of nuclear research — the White House has explicitly called for a “Manhattan Project” for AI development — the idea of seeing how the technology is being used in the place where the atom bomb was literally born was irresistible.
You can read my reporting from Los Alamos here and the rest of my reporting on AI and nuclear weapons here. Read on for a look behind the curtain at my trip to New Mexico.
—Joshua Keating, senior correspondent
MONDAY, JANUARY 12
12:30 am: My flight arrives in Santa Fe. After picking up my rental car, I make a journalistically vital stop for tacos before heading out on the 45-minute drive “up the hill” to Los Alamos.
3:30 pm: After checking in at my hotel, I have a couple of hours of daylight to play tourist and pay a visit to Los Alamos’s excellent history museum. The buildings that now house the museum predate the Manhattan Project, having been part of a private boys’ ranch school. Most of the Los Alamos lab’s early residents ended up in hastily assembled and rudimentary housing, while the school buildings ended up as housing for senior lab officials. These were the only buildings on the site with bathtubs so the street is known as “Bathtub Row” to this day.
In preparation for my trip, I’ve been reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s Robert Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus. (The main source for the movie Oppenheimer.). It’s thanks to Oppie, that the lab ended up in New Mexico in the first place. He had been traveling to the area to ride horses and unwind since his teenage years and often lamented that he was unable to combine the two great interests of his life: physics and New Mexico. Years after the lab had been constructed, Oppenheimer lamented “I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place.”
Granted, it’s not the pristine wilderness it was before World War II. Today, it’s a town of about 13,000 clustered around the lab, the area’s main employer and economic engine. But it’s still pretty beautiful, with striking desert valleys interrupted by dramatic mesas. At the time of my visit in January, the desert was still lightly dusted with snow.
TUESDAY, JANUARY 13
9 am: I meet the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) press officer who would be my guide to my visit in town and was driven in to receive my security badge. As you might expect given the work that goes on there, security at LANL is tight. No recording or photos of any kind is allowed and in some places, no electronics at all. It’s been a while since I’ve taken notes by hand in an interview, but I’ll have to get used to it.
10 am: Then I walk to the Center for Modeling and Simulation to see the massive room where LANL’s supercomputers are kept, including Venado, on which OpenAI’s ChatGPT model was recently installed. (The reason I’m here.) The room is vast and the noise inside is deafening — that’s all the fans meant to keep the machines from overheating. Gary Grider, senior director of high performance computing at the lab, gives me a tour, explaining what the computers are used for and how AI is changing work at the lab. Notably, he mentions that when he got into high-performance computing, he never expected to spend so much of his time thinking about water and electricity.
12:45 pm: After lunch, the manager of Los Alamos’s National Historical Park gives me a tour of some of Los Alamos’s historic sites. Though inside the lab and not accessible to the public, these are managed by the National Parks Service. I’m guessing they may be the only National Parks sites where you have to get an explosives safety briefing before visiting and the guides wear radiation dosimeters.
First up is “Gun Site,” where Manhattan Project researchers tested and assembled what became “Little Boy” — the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s an eerie place.
Next up is S-SITE, which was one of the most secretive sites within one of the secretive facilities in America during World War II. This is where they tested the “implosion” type bomb that was eventually used for “Fat Man,” the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It’s also where “the gadget,” the device used in the first nuclear test on July 16, 1945, was assembled. One of the stranger features of the facility are these giant boilers, which Los Alamos acquired from companies that built them to make candy and caramel. Long before OpenAI, Los Alamos relied on public-private partnerships.
2:15 pm: My last stop of the day is the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, one of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators. This nearly kilometer-long accelerator (technicians ride bicycles along it when performing maintenance) accelerates protons to massive speeds and slams them into targets to produce neutrons which can be used for a variety of purposes for both civilian science and nuclear weapons research. At the time I visited, the accelerator was turned off for maintenance, which meant I got to walk inside the tunnel.
5 pm: After a trip to a local coffee shop to try to decipher my hand-scrawled notes and type them up, I drive up to the Valles Caldera, a massive volcanic crater in the mountains above the lab. I’ll spare you my Cormac McCarthy impression (“friscalating dusklight” and all that) but it’s a pretty dramatic scene at sunset.
6 pm: It's now evening in Los Alamos, which I realize feels a bit like a college town but without young people. I grab a quick bite at a Chinese noodle shop and then a beer at the Bathtub Row Brewery, home of the “Hoppenheimer.”
THURSDAY, JANUARY 15
7 am: Thanks to the time difference, I’m up early for a run on what the internet tells me is an easy, low-crade trail but turns out to be more of a rock scramble along a sheer cliff face with ice as an added feature. The views are something else though.
10 am: I’m back at LANL for another day of reporting. This day is wall-to-wall interviews with Los Alamos’s deputy director for weapons, national security director, and a senior AI researcher. I wrap up the day with a conversation with two scientists, materials researcher Danny Perez and chemist Ping Yan, to talk about how they’re using AI in research that ranges from radiation treatments for cancer to more efficient ways to process rare earth metals. Maintaining and researching weapons has been and remains the lab’s primary raison d’etre, but there are a lot of other types of research going on here.
5 pm: After a brief stop at Los Alamos’s science museum — as you can imagine, this is a town that takes its science museum seriously — it’s back down the hill to Santa Fe and my flight home to DC.
Read Josh’s story from this reporting trip here.