Home Speakers Leopold Aschenbrenner Quote 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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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 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.
On the same topics Blog The Most Important Market in AI is the Middle Sep 23, 2026
But the right tail of the market is thinner than almost anyone forecast. Blog The Most Important Market in AI is the Middle Sep 23, 2026
Demand for intelligence is not a pyramid with a small, wealthy peak paying for everything beneath it. Blog The Most Important Market in AI is the Middle Sep 23, 2026
Most business AI use is the messy middle: multi-step workflows that need a smart enough model at a price a company can afford. It is the most important part of the market today, & it is where the competition is fiercest. Blog Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models? Sep 22, 2026
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. Blog Frontier Overhangs Sep 21, 2026
A world with sufficient compute is one where intelligence is a commodity, and in commodity markets margin comes from a superior cost structure, which I would expect the leading model providers to have, in part because they have a meaningful lead in scaling and can apply superior AI to their infrastructure. Blog Frontier Overhangs Sep 21, 2026
Pure capability no longer translates directly into a moat. About this quote 
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