Leopold Aschenbrenner

“Look. The models, they just want to learn. You have to understand this. The models, they just want to learn…”

“GPT-4 has the raw smarts to do a decent chunk of many people’s jobs, but it’s sort of like a smart new hire that just showed up 5 minutes ago: it doesn’t have any relevant context, hasn’t read the company docs or Slack history or had conversations with members of the team, or spent any time understanding the company-internal codebase. A smart new hire isn’t that useful 5 minutes after arriving—but they are quite useful a month in! It seems like it should be possible, for example via very-long-context, to ‘onboard’ models like we would a new human coworker. This alone would be a huge unlock.”

“It is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer That doesn’t require believing in sci-fi; it just requires believing in straight lines on a graph”

“Soon, the AIs will be running the world, but we’re in for one last rodeo. May their final stewardship bring honor to mankind.”

“Before long, the world will wake up. 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.”

“The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word. Along the way, national security forces not seen in half a century will be unleashed, and before long, The Project will be on. If we’re lucky, we’ll be in an all-out race with the CCP; if we’re unlucky, an all-out war.”