Home Speakers Leopold Aschenbrenner Quote 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.
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More from Leopold Aschenbrenner Essay Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead Jun 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. 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 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 Blog The Future Is for Everyone: Muse for Small Business Sep 29, 2026
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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. About this quote 
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