Jeff Bezos Loved ‘Oppenheimer’ and Robert Downey Jr.’s Role in Film

• Jeff Bezos is a fan of Christopher Nolan’s hit film “Oppenheimer.”
• The billionaire gushed about the film and its star Robert Downey Jr. to podcaster Lex Fridman.
• He cited the biopic while expounding on the benefits and risks of AI technology.

Christopher Nolan can now count Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as an “Oppenheimer” fan.

“I don’t know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer. First of all, I loved the movie,” Bezos told Lex Fridman in the latest episode of the latter’s podcast, which aired on Thursday.

Interestingly, Bezos didn’t seem to be that captivated by Cillian Murphy’s turn as the titular character in the movie.

The billionaire instead singled out Robert Downey Jr. The “Iron Man” star played Lewis Strauss, the former chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, in the film.

“I thought the best part of the movie is this bureaucrat played by Robert Downey Jr., who some of the people I’ve talked to think that’s the most boring part of the movie,” Bezos told Fridman.

“I thought it was the most fascinating because what’s going on here is you realize we have invented these awesome, destructive, powerful technologies called nuclear weapons, and we humans, we’re not really capable of wielding these weapons. And that’s what he represented in that movie,” Bezos continued.

The Amazon founder cited the biopic while talking about the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence.

“Even specialized AI could be very bad for humanity. Just regular machine learning models can make certain weapons of war, that could be incredibly destructive and very powerful,” Bezos told Fridman earlier in the interview.

But Bezos said he is optimistic about the technology’s overall benefits despite its dangers.

“So the people who are overly concerned, in my view, overly, it is a valid debate. I think that they may be missing part of the equation, which is how helpful they could be in making sure we don’t destroy ourselves,” Bezos said.

Managing the development of AI has been a source of contention amongst tech executives.

While some, like Bezos, believe that people may have overestimated the technology’s risks, others believe that AI poses an existential threat. In April, Elon Musk told Fox News that he thinks the technology “has the potential of civilization destruction.”

“AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production,” Musk, who has since set up his own AI company, told Fox News then.

Representatives for Bezos and Downey Jr. did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.