Sam Altman Bet Millions on a Hot-Tub-Sized Nuclear Reactor Before Anyone Cared About AI
The Two-Billion-Year-Old Nuclear Reactor That Inspired Everything
Oklo's CEO and co-founder, Jacob DeWitte, grew up in New Mexico — specifically, in the backyard of Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the first nuclear weapons were developed. If you're looking for an origin story that screams "this person was always going to end up in the nuclear business," growing up next to the birthplace of the atomic bomb is about as on-the-nose as it gets.
While doing his PhD in nuclear engineering at MIT, Jacob met his co-founder and COO, Caroline Cochran. They bonded over a shared obsession with a natural phenomenon that sounds like it was invented by a science fiction writer who'd given up on plausibility: a natural nuclear reactor that ran safely, by itself, for hundreds of thousands of years — two billion years ago in West Africa.
In 1972, French scientists discovered that uranium deposits in Oklo, Gabon, had spontaneously achieved nuclear fission roughly 1.7 billion years ago. These natural reactors operated in cycles — heating up, moderating themselves, cooling down — for several hundred thousand years without any intervention from anyone, on account of humans not existing yet. The reactor regulated itself using nothing but the laws of physics. Jacob and Caroline named their company after it. This is either very poetic or the most ambitious corporate naming flex in history.
Both founders grew up in the shadow of Chernobyl and Fukushima — disasters that turned public opinion and government funding decisively against nuclear power. But Caroline and Jacob understood something that the broader public discourse often misses: the fear of accidents isn't the only reason nuclear hasn't scaled. The economics are equally catastrophic.
Traditional nuclear plants are financial nightmares. Projects routinely run billions over budget and years behind schedule. The industry's track record for delivering on time and on budget is, to put it charitably, non-existent. To Caroline and Jacob, the question wasn't "can we make nuclear safer?" It was: "can we make nuclear smaller, cheaper, and so simple that it doesn't require an army of PhD physicists to keep it from exploding?"