Home Speakers Leopold Aschenbrenner Quote But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Leopold Aschenbrenner Essay Situational Awareness IV: The Project Jun 4, 2024
By 28/29 the intelligence explosion will be underway; by 2030, we will have summoned superintelligence, in all its power and might. Essay Situational Awareness IV: The Project Jun 4, 2024
By the early 2030s, the entirety of the US arsenal (like it or not, the bedrock of global peace and security) will probably be obsolete. Essay Situational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster Jun 4, 2024
Do we really want the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project to be controlled by some capricious Middle Eastern dictatorship? Essay Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead Jun 4, 2024
Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year. Essay Situational Awareness I: From GPT-4 to AGI Jun 4, 2024
I make the following claim: it is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer. Essay Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead Jun 4, 2024
Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Essay Situational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster Jun 4, 2024
The trillion-dollar, 100GW cluster alone would require ~20% of current US electricity generation in 6 years; together with large inference capacity, demand will be multiples higher. Essay Situational Awareness IV: The Project Jun 4, 2024
Ultimately, my main claim here is descriptive: whether we like it or not, superintelligence won’t look like an SF startup, and in some way will be primarily in the domain of national security. Essay Situational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster Jun 4, 2024
White-collar workers are paid tens of trillions of dollars in wages annually worldwide; a drop-in remote worker that automates even a fraction of white-collar/cognitive jobs (imagine, say, a truly automated AI coder) would pay for the trillion-dollar cluster.
On the same topics Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: Agent swarms, alignment, and recursive self-improvement Sep 17, 2026
And actually the models today are far beyond what was possible even six months ago. Talk Import AI 458 / 2026 Cosmos HAI Lab Lecture, Oxford May 26, 2026
It’s time to plan for this, because AI systems are likely to get better a lot faster than people expect, and as they become more advanced we should expect profound changes to happen to people and to society. Talk Import AI 458 / 2026 Cosmos HAI Lab Lecture, Oxford May 26, 2026
When I look at the graph, I feel a sense of vertigo, because I know a little bit about what underlies this graph. Blog Untitled post, April 2026 Apr 10, 2026
My personal takeaway from the last several years, and take on why there has been so much Shakespearean drama between the companies in our field, comes down to this: “Once you see AGI you can’t unsee it.” Blog Untitled post, April 2026 Apr 10, 2026
The only solution I can come up with is to orient towards sharing the technology with people broadly, and for no one to have the ring. Interview Big Technology Podcast: Doubling Down on Text Models, The Superapp Plan, Codex's Potential Apr 7, 2026
And at this point we have line of sight to much better models that are coming this year, and the amount of pain within OpenAI that we’ve had to decide how to allocate compute goes up, not down, over time. About this quote Said by Leopold Aschenbrenner, Founder, Situational Awareness LP Where Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead Topics AGI Company SA Situational AwarenessSource situational-awareness.ai/ A quote is one moment, not the whole argument. Read it in context at the source.
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