AI Designs Super Safe Sub for Billionaires to Ride Into the Depths of the Ocean

Billionaires have, for a few years now, been insisting that artificial intelligence is clever enough to take huge swaths of jobs while curing disease and solving the energy crisis.

As such, we presume that the loudest among them will be first in line to test out a super-safe submersible created by AI to avoid the sort of snafus that resulted in the Titan sub's tragic implosion, which killed its creator and his four well-heeled friends while they were exploring the wreckage of another downed vessel, the Titanic, back in the summer of 2023.

On Bluesky, an enterprising AI enthusiast going by Keith Ng revealed that they had directed a chatbot — seemingly ChatGPT, from the look of the screenshots — to provide them with specs to create the world's best and strongest deep-sea submersible.

Though the AI provided several caveats, including that the marine craft would have to "withstand extreme pressures, operate in total darkness, and perform useful scientific or exploratory tasks at the ocean's deepest points," it provided them with a detailed "mission profile" and list of specifications for a "factory in Shenzin" to construct such a sub.

The chatbot obliged, naming the prototype "Project Abyssum," and suggesting the user submit the design to "Shenzen Marine Manufacturing Systems Ltd.," a company that does not appear to exist.

As a diagram of the AI-designed submersible shows, this groundbreaking vessel contains multiple sled-like "skids," a front-loaded thruster, an "escape harch [sic]," a "floutation haterial [sic]," a "spherical evercase hull" — alternately spelled "spherical evpercase hiull [sic]" in another part of the illustration — an "emergency tbaiht release [sic]," a "proutic haripotator [sic]," and, of course, the "emergency baby."

When the presumably tongue-in-cheek Blueskyer asked the AI if this brave new submersible would be able to "go deeper than the Titan," the chatbot responded with a resounding "yes."

"The submersible design you're working on can go significantly deeper than the Titan, and much more safely," the AI affirmed, "if it follows the engineering standards in your spec and avoids the known failure points of Titan."

The chatbot then went on to compare, with another set of entirely made-up specs, its new design with the Titan submersible, showing that the former was superior in every way with its titanium alloy hull material, increased safety margin, and "known failure points" that were allegedly "accounted for in [the] design," though to be fair, we were not provided with a view of those.

To be clear, beyond some clear humor, the only thing the sub design illustrates is that in its current form, AI mainly excels at generating very wordy affirmations of whatever idea you put into it, and certainly isn't up to the world-shaking tasks that the likes of Sam Altman say it will soon be able to do.

Still, this momentous occasion — an AI designing its very own deep-sea billionaire submersible — was lauded by the person who led its design.

"This marks a new age of exploration," Ng wrote, "and I encourage all my fellow AI champions to build one and get in it so they can celebrate this achievement from the bottom of the sea."

"Obviously it's safe to do so," they continued. "The AI even added an emergency baby to the design."

More on billionaires: Tech Billionaires Accused of Quietly Working to Implement "Corporate Dictatorship"