Situational Awareness

Jun 05 2024 9 ep. 32 mins 11
Situational Awareness Podcast artwork

Audio narration of “Situational Awareness” by Leopold Aschenbrenner.

  Technology  Society & Culture
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“SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 2 mins  
Leopold Aschenbrenner, June 2024 You can see the future first in San Francisco. Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans. Behind the scenes, there's a fierce scramble to secure every power contract still availabl

“I. From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 60 mins  
AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and “unhobbling” gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expect another preschooler-to-high-schooler-sized qualitative jump by 2027.

“II. From AGI to Superintelligence: the Intelligence Explosion” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 56 mins  
AI progress won’t stop at human-level. Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year. We would rapidly go from human-level to vastly superhuman AI systems. The power—and the peril—of superintelligence would be dramatic. Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine tha

“IIIa. Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 32 mins  
The most extraordinary techno-capital acceleration has been set in motion. As AI revenue grows rapidly, many trillions of dollars will go into GPU, datacenter, and power buildout before the end of the decade. The industrial mobilization, including growing US electricity production by 10s of percent, will be intense. You see, I told you it couldn’t be done withou

“IIIb. Lock Down the Labs: Security for AGI” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 30 mins  
The nation's leading AI labs treat security as an afterthought. Currently, they’re basically handing the key secrets for AGI to the CCP on a silver platter. Securing the AGI secrets and weights against the state-actor threat will be an immense effort, and we’re not on track. They met in the evening in Wigner's office. “Szilard outlined the Columbia data,”

“IIIc. Superalignment” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 40 mins  
Reliably controlling AI systems much smarter than we are is an unsolved technical problem. And while it is a solvable problem, things could very easily go off the rails during a rapid intelligence explosion. Managing this will be extremely tense; failure could easily be catastrophic. The old sorcerer Has finally gone away! Now the spirits he controls Shall obey my

“IIId. The Free World Must Prevail” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 30 mins  
Superintelligence will give a decisive economic and military advantage. China isn’t at all out of the game yet. In the race to AGI, the free world's very survival will be at stake. Can we maintain our preeminence over the authoritarian powers? And will we manage to avoid self-destruction along the way? The story of the human race is War. Except for brief and prec

“IV. The Project” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 31 mins  
As the race to AGI intensifies, the national security state will get involved. The USG will wake from its slumber, and by 27/28 we’ll get some form of government AGI project. No startup can handle superintelligence. Somewhere in a SCIF, the endgame will be on. “We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects—hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs,

“V. Parting Thoughts” by Leopold Aschenbrenner

Jun 05 2024 8 mins  
What if we’re right? “I remember the spring of 1941 to this day. I realized then that a nuclear bomb was not only possible — it was inevitable. Sooner or later these ideas could not be peculiar to us. Everybody would think about them before long, and some country would put them into action. […] And there was nobody to talk to about it, I had many sleepless