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Leopold Aschenbrenner quote, Jun 4, 2024

Founder, Situational Awareness LP · Jun 4, 2024 · Essay, Situational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster

Do we really want the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project to be controlled by some capricious Middle Eastern dictatorship?

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Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from 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.Jun 4, 2024· Essay
By 28/29 the intelligence explosion will be underway; by 2030, we will have summoned superintelligence, in all its power and might.Jun 4, 2024· Essay
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.Jun 4, 2024· Essay
Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year.Jun 4, 2024· Essay
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.Jun 4, 2024· Essay
Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters.Jun 4, 2024· Essay
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.Jun 4, 2024· Essay
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.Jun 4, 2024· Essay
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.Jun 4, 2024· Essay

On the same topics

Quote
Frontier AI should be licensed like other critical technologies; medicine, aviation, and nuclear energy, to incentivize safe development.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
We must agree collectively that no one, no company and no country, should develop an AI system that could cause large-scale harm.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote
Even if you believe in a deal with China, and I do not, we (and others) now know competitors can catch up more quickly than we had thought, at least if they think they have a chance of winning.Tyler CowenSep 22, 2026· Post
If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute.Tyler CowenSep 22, 2026· Post
AI must not be placed in the hands of children without first being tested, evaluated, and therefore authorized.Emmanuel MacronSep 22, 2026· Statement
About this quote
Said by
Leopold Aschenbrenner, Founder, Situational Awareness LP
Where
Situational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster
Topics
Compute, Regulation
Company
Situational Awareness
Source
situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-dollar-cluster/

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