The atom bomb was summoned by wizards and pure thought.
And of course no experiments whatsoever, the cost of the Manhattan project, the hundreds of thousands of employees were merely a "focusing" magick, a sacrifice to re-enforce the greater powers of our handful of esteemed and glorious thinking men, who wrought the power of destruction from the æther.
@ESYudkowsky: Yes, but because the first nuclear weapon makers knew what the duck they were doing - analytic precise prediction of desired outcomes and of each intervening step. AGI makers lack similar mastery or anything remotely close, and have a much harder problem; that's the big issue.
@EigenGender: seems pretty noteworthy that the first nuclear weapons were made under conditions where they couldn’t do any experiments and they involved a lot of math but still worked on the first try.