Jews created the nuclear bomb.
I'm not the first person to notice that a strangely large number of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project (the U.S. government’s program to develop atomic weapons in WWII) were Jewish.
The number of Jews involved in the project was astounding; the vast majority of the scientists were Jewish. Almost all of them were German, Hungarian or Austrian refugees. The list included: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Project director and nicknamed “The father of atomic bomb,” Edward Teller, Leo Szilard, Otto Frisch, Niels Bohr Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, John von Neuman, Rudolf Peierls, Franz Eugene Simon, Hans Halban, Joseph Rotblatt, Stanislav Ulam, Richard Feynman, and Eugene Wigner. One of the few prominent non-Jews involved in the project, Enrico Fermi, left Italy to save his Jewish wife from fascist persecution.
I would also add to this list Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission, and Albert Einstein, who kickstarted the Project by writing a letter to President Roosevelt.
In other words, despite making up less than 4% of America’s population in 1940, Jews somehow comprised the bulk of America’s nuclear talent. It is no exaggeration to say that without Jews, America probably would not have been the first country to develop the Bomb.
And not only were all these people Jewish, they were also the same kind of Jew. They may or may not have been raised religious, but they invariably became atheists by the time they were adults. And despite coming from Jewish families, they did not identify very strongly with the Jewish community (at least until the Nazis came). There was no requirement that the most brilliant nuclear physicists of the early 20th Century all be assimilated, secular Jews. Yet, biography after biography of Manhattan Project scientists describes this exact archetype.
(As always, Scott Alexander has an interesting write-up of this phenomenon if you’re curious.)
Fast forward 80 years, and another highly consequential and potentially catastrophic technology is now being spearheaded by the Jews: artificial intelligence.
A quick glance at the big names in AI will reveal many Jews. This includes famous researchers (e.g. Yoshua Bengio), writers (e.g. Zvi Mowshowitz), CEOs (e.g. Sam Altman), AI safety advocates (e.g. Ilya Sutskever), and even doomers (e.g. Eliezer Yudkowsky). Wikipedia has an extensive list of Jewish-American computer scientists, and articles have been written about the prevalence of Jewish and Israeli machine learning experts. Regardless of what you think about the State of Israel, it’s hard to deny Israel’s place in the world of tech and AI.
Anecdotally, when I went to Manifest last month (a conference not specifically about AI but where AI was a frequent topic of discussion), I noticed a lot of Jews. Several of the event’s organizers and top guests were Jewish. Jewish Manifesters included AI researchers, policy wonks, bloggers, and even a few company heads. I estimate that about 20% of the attendees were Jewish — more than enough to provide a Friday night minyan despite the event’s relatively small size. Most of the Jews I met also fit the Manhattan Project archetype: atheist or at least not very religious, and not presenting any outward markers of their Judaism other than having a Jewish name and phenotype. (I feel comfortable saying this because I also fit the archetype.)
Ok, but maybe I’m only seeing so many Jews in AI because I’m looking for them. It’s easy to cherry-pick names, but much harder to quantify Jews as a percentage of the AI field. After all, there’s no central database of who’s “in” AI and how many of them are Jewish. To check more objectively, I looked at TIME’s List of the 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and counted the number of Jews. To classify people as Jewish or not, I did a cursory Google search of their biography and looked for any signs of Judaism; if I didn’t see any, I counted them as not Jewish. Using this method, I counted 12 Jews (spreadsheet here). That is certainly a downgrade from the days of the Manhattan Project. But still, for a group that only represents 2% of the U.S. population and 0.2% of the global population, Jews making up 12% of the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence is pretty impressive. Plus, given my methodology, I am likely undercounting the number of Jews, since several people on the list may be Jewish but just haven’t spoken about it publicly.
I also found this website, which lists various Jewish computer and information science prize recipients. Although computer science is an older and broader field than machine learning, it should still provide a decent approximation for Jews in AI:
Based on all the information I’ve been able to find, it does seem like Jews are highly overrepresented within artificial intelligence.
To give some other facts that may be relevant:
Despite making up just 0.2% of the global population, Jews represent more than a fifth of all Nobel Prize winners.
Ashkenazi Jews have an average IQ of 108-115, the highest of any measured ethnic group.
Despite making up just 2.4% of the US population, Jews comprise 15% of American lawyers.
Clearly, something is going on here. Plenty of scholars have tried to provide explanations for Jewish intelligence and success. Some have suggested it’s due to the Jews' strong work ethic or the value we place on education. Some have suggested it’s due to the Jewish tradition of Talmudic debate, which encourages creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Some have suggested it’s because Ashkenazi Jews are genetically superior. Or maybe it’s because we’re God’s chosen people.
Whatever the reason, one thing is clear: If you do work in AI, you’re probably gonna see a lot of Jews.
I was going to say wasn't there some kind of connection to a high school in Hungary... but of course you found the link about that one. Scott Alexander does a great job lingering in the long term memory.
Great article Liam, this was a very entertaining and informative read