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Leopold Aschenbrenner quote, Jun 4, 2024

Founder, Situational Awareness LP · Jun 4, 2024 · Essay, Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead

Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year.

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

More from Leopold Aschenbrenner

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

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An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term.Scott AlexanderSep 24, 2026· Post
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This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions.Scott AlexanderSep 23, 2026· Post
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain.Nathan LambertSep 19, 2026· Post
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar.Noam BrownSep 17, 2026· Interview
About this quote
Said by
Leopold Aschenbrenner, Founder, Situational Awareness LP
Where
Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead
Topics
Research, Superintelligence
Company
Situational Awareness
Source
situational-awareness.ai/

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