Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Leopold Aschenbrenner
EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade AheadJun 4, 2024
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.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 4, 2024
By 28/29 the intelligence explosion will be underway; by 2030, we will have summoned superintelligence, in all its power and might.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 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.EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar ClusterJun 4, 2024
Do we really want the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project to be controlled by some capricious Middle Eastern dictatorship?EssaySituational Awareness I: From GPT-4 to AGIJun 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.EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade AheadJun 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.EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar ClusterJun 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.EssaySituational Awareness IV: The ProjectJun 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.EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar ClusterJun 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.
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For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else.BlogThe Specter Of NeuraleseSep 24, 2026
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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.
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