YouSaid · the spoken record

Leopold Aschenbrenner

lines on the record: 332
first: 2024-06-04
most recent: 2024-06-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Is really important. And then Zillard kind of assaulted Fermi with the kind of another secrecy appeal. And Fermi was just kind of, he was pissed off. He had a temper tantrum. He was like, he thought it was absurd. Come on, this is crazy. But Zillard persisted. I think they roped in another guy, Pegram. And then Fermi didn't publish it. And that was just in time because Fermi not publishing it meant that the Nazis didn't figure out Graphite would work. They went down this path of heavy water. And that was the wrong path. That was why this is a key reason why the sort of German project didn't work out. They were kind of way behind. And, you know, I think we face a similar situation on are we just going to instantly leak the sort of how do we get past the data wall? What's the next paradigm or are we not?”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, I don't know Germany during World War II, you know, they went down the wrong path. They did heavy water. And that was wrong. And there's actually an amazing anecdote in the making of the atomic bomb on this, right? So secrety is actually one of the most contentious issues early on as well. And part of it was sort of Zillow Art or whatever really thought this sort of nuclear chain reaction was possible. And so atomic bomb was possible. And you went around and he was like, this is going to be of enormous strategic importance, military importance. And a lot of people didn't believe it. Or they're kind of like, well, maybe this is possible, but I'm going to act as though it's not possible. And science should be open and all these things. And anyway, and so these early days, so there had been some sort of incorrect measurements made on graphite as a moderator and that Germany had. And so they thought, you know, graphite was not going to work. We have to do heavy water. But then Fermi made some new measurements on graphite, and they indicated that graphite would work.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like not that hard. I just think, you know, the US and the sort of, I mean, all the leading ant labs in the United States, and they have this huge lead. I mean, by default, China actually has some good LLMs. Why do they have good LLMs? They're just using the sort of open source code, right? You know, Llama or whatever. And so I think people really underrate both the sort of divergence on algorithmic progress and the lead the U.S. would have by default. Because all this stuff was published until recently, right? Like Chinchilla scaling laws were published. There's a bunch of MOE papers. There's transformers and all that stuff was published. And so that's why open source is good. That's why China can make some good models. That stuff is now, I mean, at least they're not publishing it anymore. And, you know, if we actually kept it secret, it would be this huge edge. To your point about sort of like some tacit knowledge, Alec Bradford, you know, there's another layer at the bottom that is something about large scale engineering work to make these big training ones work. I think that is a little bit more tacit knowledge. So I think that, but I think China will be able to figure that out. That's like sort of engineering slap. They're going to figure out how to figure that out.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The back of a napkin because if it's that easy, then What are you copying down? Well, I think there's a few layers to this, right? So I think at the top is kind of like sort of the. Fundamental approach, right? And sort of like, I don't know, on pre training, it might be unsupervised learning, next token protection train on the entire internet. You actually get a lot of juice out of that already. That one's very quick to communicate. Then there's a lot of details that matter. And you were talking about this earlier, right? It's like probably the way that thing people are going to figure out is going to be somewhat obvious. There's going to be some kind of like clear, you know, not that complicated thing that'll work, but there's going to be a lot of details to getting that right.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, um, I think this is the compute stuff is sexy. We talk about it, but I think people underrate the secrets because the half in order of magnitude a year just by default sort of algorithmic progress, that's huge. If we have a few year lead by default, that's 10, 30x, 100x barrier cluster if we protected them. And then there's this additional layer of the data wall, right? And so we have to get through the data wall. That means we actually have to figure out some sort of basic new paradigm, sort of the alpha go step two, right? Alpha go step one is learns from human imitation. China can't steal that, then they're stuck. If they can't steal it, they're off to the races.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, like, there's a few different things, right? So, one threat model is just stealing the weights themselves. And the weights one is sort of particularly insane, right? Because they can just steal the literal end product, right? Just make a replica of the atomic bomb, and then they're just ready to go. And I think that one just is extremely important around the time we have AGI and superintelligence, right? Because China can build a big cluster. By default, we'd have a big lead, right? Because we have the better scientists, but we make the superintelligence, they just steal it. They're off to the races. Weights are a little bit less important right now because, you know, who cares if they steal the GP4 weights, right? Like, whatever. And so, you know, we still have to get started on weight security now because, you know, look, if we think AGI for 27, you know, this stuff is going to take a while. And it's not just going to be like, oh, we do some access control. If you actually want to be resistant to sort of Chinese espionage, it needs to be much more intense. The thing, though, that I think people aren't paying enough attention to is the secrets, as you say.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About Scarlet Johansen's voice I mean, all extremely easy, right? You know, deep mind, even they don't make a claim that it's hard, right? DeepMind put out their like whatever frontier safety something and they like layout security levels and they security level zero to four and four is the New Brazilian resistant to state actors and they say we're at level zero right and then you know I mean just recently there's like an indictment of a guy who just like stole the code a bunch of like really important AI code and went to China with it and you know all he had to do to steal the code was copy the code and put it into Apple Notes and then export it as PDF and that got past their monitoring right and Google is the best security of any of the i labs probably because they have the you know the google infrastructure i mean i think i don't know roughly i would think of this as like you know uh security of a startup right and like what is security of a startup look like right you know it's not that good it's it's it's easy to steal”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, well, if they can steal the algorithms and if they can steal the way. And that's really where sort of, I mean, we should talk about this. This is really important. And I think, you know,”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the UAE on its own is not competitive, right? It's like, I mean, they're already export controlled. We're not, you know, there's like, you're not actually supposed to ship NVIDIA chips over there, right? It's not like they have any of the leading AI labs. It's like they have money, but it's actually hard to just translate money into like”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've heard from multiple people, and this wasn't from my time at OpenAI, and I haven't seen the memo, but I have heard from multiple people that at some point several years ago, Open AI leadership had sort of laid out a plan to fund and sell AGI by starting a bidding war between the governments of the United States, China, and Russia. And so it's kind of surprising to me that they're willing to sell AGI to the Chinese and Russian governments, but also there's something that sort of feels a bit eerily familiar about kind of starting the spitting war and then kind of like playing them off each other. And well, you know, if you don't do this, China will do it. So anyway.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reported that it's been reported that Sam is trying to raise $7 trillion or whatever for a chip project. And, you know, it's unclear how many of the clusters will be there and so on. But it's definitely stuff is happening. I mean, look, I think another reason I'm a little bit, at least suspicious of this argument of like, look, if the US doesn't work with them, they'll go to China is.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I mean, I think I think there's some merit to the argument, and in the sense that I think we should be doing basically benefit sharing with them, right? I think we should talk about this later, but I think basically sort of on the road to AGI, there should be kind of like two tiers of coalitions. It should be the sort of narrow coalition of democracies that sort of the coalition that's developing AGI. And then there should be a broader coalition where we kind of go to other countries, including dictatorships, and we're willing to offer them some of the benefits of AI, some of the sharing. And so it's like, look, if the UAE wants to use AI product, if they want to run meta recommendation engines, if they want to run the last generation models, that's fine. I think by default, they just wouldn't have had this seat at the AGI table, right? And so it's like, yeah, they have some money, but a lot of people have money. The only reason they're getting this sort of coursey at the AGI table, the only reason we're giving these dictators will have this enormous amount of leverage over this extremely national security relevant technology is because we're, you know, we're kind of getting.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think, I don't know, I think, I mean, one thing the Middle East does offer is capital, but it's like America has plenty of capital, right? It's like, you know, we have trillion dollar companies. Like, what are these Middle Eastern states? They're kind of like trillion dollar oil companies. We have trillion dollar companies and we have very deep financial markets. And it's like, you know, Microsoft could issue hundreds of billions of bonds and they can pay for these clusters. I mean, look, I think another argument being made, and I think it's worth taking seriously, is an argument that, look, if we don't work with the UAE or with these Middle Eastern countries, they're just going to go to China, right? And so, you know, they're going to build data centers. They're going to pour money into AI regardless. And if we don't work with them, they'll just support China.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Activated for AI yet, but at some point the same way the United States and a lot of people in the US and the United States government is going to wake up at some point the CCP is going to wake up.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of concessions In World War II, right? It was just, you know, before 39 or whatever, the American military was in total shambles, right? You read about it and it reads a little bit like, you know, the German military today, right? It's like, you know, military expenditures, I think, were less than 2% of GDP. You know, all the European countries had gone, even in peacetime, you know, like above 10% of GDP, sort of this like rapid mobilization. There's nothing. We're making kind of like no planes. There's no military contracts. Everything had been starved during the Great Depression. But there was this latent capacity. And at some point, the United States got their act together. I mean, the thing I'll say is I think the supplies for the other way around too to basically to China, right? And I think sometimes people are, you know, they kind of count them out a little bit and like the export controls and so on. And they're able to make some networks now. I think there's a question of like how many could they make. But I think there's at least a possibility that they're going to be able to mature that ability and make a lot of 7 nanometer chips. And there's a lot of latent industrial capacity in China. And they are able to build a lot of power fast. And maybe that isn't.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have multiple clusters and connect them and have thick cables basically. And so, look, I mean, ideally, we do both, right? Ideally, we do natural gas and the broad deregulatory agenda. I think we have to do at least one. And then I think this possible stuff is just possible in the United States.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the issue there is a lot of people have sort of these made these climate commitments, they're not just government, it's actually the private companies themselves, right? The Microsoft, the Amazons, and so on, have these climate commitments, so they won't do natural gas. And I admire the climate commitments, but I think at some point the national interest and national security kind of is more important. The other path is you can do this sort of green energy megaprojects, right? You do the solar and the batteries and the SMRs and geothermal. But if we want to do that, there needs to be sort of a sort of broad deregulatory push, right? So you can't have permitting take a decade, right? So you got to reform FERC. You got to have blanket NEPA exemptions for this stuff. There's inane state level regulations that are like, yeah, you could build the solar panels and batteries next to your data center, but it'll still take years because, you know, you actually have to hook it up to the state electrical grid. And you'll have to use governmental powers to create rights of way to kind of.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Amount that we have to get our act together, right? So I think there's basically two paths to doing it in the US one is you just got to be willing to do natural gas and there's ample natural gas, right? You put your cluster in West Texas, you put it in southwest Pennsylvania by the Mercello shale. 10 gigawa cluster is super easy, 100 gigawatt cluster, also pretty doable. You know, I think natural gas production in the United States has almost doubled in a decade. You do that one more time over the next seven years or whatever, you could power multiple trillion dollar data centers.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another one is People saying, some people think that you can't do it in the US. I think we actually face a sort of real system competition here because, again, some people think it's only autocracies that can do this, that can kind of like top down, mobilize the sort of industrial capacity, the power, you know, get the stuff done fast. And again, this is the sort of thing we haven't faced in a while. But during the Cold War, there was this sort of intense system competition, right? Like East West Germany was this, right? Like West Germany kind of like liberal democratic capitalism versus kind of communist state planned. Now it's obvious that the sort of free world would win. But even as late as like 61, you know, Paul Samuelson was predicting that the Soviet Union would outgrow the United States because they were able to sort of mobilize industry better. And so, yeah, there's some people who, you know, shit posts about loving America by day, but then in private, they're betting against America. They're betting against the liberal order. And I think I basically just think it's a bad bet. And the reason I think it's a bad bet is I think this stuff is just really possible in the U.S. And so to make it possible in the U.S., there's some...”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The future of RL looks a lot like inference, for example, right? Or you just kind of end up connecting them in time. You have this like a lot raw material. It's like, you know, it's placing your uranium refinement facilities there. Sure. Anyway, so a few reasons, right? One is just like they don't think about this as the AGI cluster. Another is just like easy money from the Middle East, right?”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just think it's harder to distinguish between inference and training compute. And so people can claim it's training compute, but I think they might realize that actually this is going to be useful for inference compute, and actually it's useful for training compute too.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At all And then you I mean, there's a few reasons. One of them is just like people aren't thinking about this as the AGI superintelligence cluster. They're just like, ah, you know, like cool clusters for my chatGPT.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you're just in this really tight race. And I think that sort of like if you're in this really tight race, the sort of feverish struggle, I think that's when sort of there's the greatest peril of self-destruction.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think everything, I think the riskiest situation is if we're in some sort of really tight neck, feverish international struggle, right? If we're like really close with the CCP and we're like months apart, I think the situation we want to be in, we could be in if we played our cards right is a little bit more like the US building the atomic bomb versus the German project way behind, years behind. And if we have that, I think we just have so much more wiggle room. Like to get safety right, we're going to be building there's going to be these crazy new WMDs, things that completely undermine nuclear deterrence, intense competition. And that's so much easier to deal with if you're like, you know, it's not just, you know, you don't have somebody right on your tails. You got to go, go, go, you got to go maximum.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do a lot with 33 million extremely smart scientists. And again, a lot of this stuff, you know, so first of all, it's like, you know, that might be enough to build the crazy bioweapons, right? And then you're in a situation where like, now, wow, we've just like, they stole the weights, they seized the compute. Now they can make these crazy new WMDs that will be possible superintelligence. And now you just kind of like proliferated the stuff. And it'll be really powerful. And also, I mean, I think, you know. 3x on compute isn't actually that much. And so the... I think a thing I worry a lot about is.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“25% of the compute capacity in the sort of Middle Eastern dictatorships, well, they seize that, and now it's sort of a ratio of compute of three to one. And we still have some more. But even only 25% of compute there, I think it starts getting pretty hairy. I think three to one is not that great of a ratio. You can do a lot with that amount of compute. And then look, even if they don't actually do this, right? Even if they don't actually seize the compute, even if they actually don't steal the weights, there's just a lot of implicit leverage you get, right? They get the seed at the AGI table. Know, I don't know why we're giving authoritarian dictatorships the seat at the AGI table.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, I think there's some people who are trying to build clusters elsewhere. And, you know, there's like a lot of free-flowing Middle Eastern money that's trying to build clusters elsewhere. This comes back to the sort of like national security question we talked about earlier, would you do the Manhattan Project in the UAE, right? And I think basically putting the clusters, I think you can put them in the US, you can put them in sort of like ally democracies. But I think once you put them in kind of like dictatorships, authoritarian dictatorships, you kind of create this irreversible security risk, right? So, I mean, one cluster is there, much easier for them to exfiltrate the weights. They can literally steal the AGI, the superintelligence. It's like they got a copy of the atomic bomb, and they just got a direct replica of that. And it makes it much easier to them. I mean, weird ties to China. You can ship that to China. So that's a huge risk. Another thing is they can just seize the compute, right? Like maybe right now they just think of this. I mean, in general, I think people, you know, I think the issue here is people are thinking of this as ChatGPT, big tech product clusters. But I think the cluster is being planned now three to five years out. It may well be the AGI superintelligence clusters. And so anyway, so when things get hot, they might just seize the compute. And I don't know, supposedly put.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For like natural gas. But I do think it is incredibly important, incredibly important that these clusters are in the United States.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clust I mean, I think that in some sense, this is the thing that I always find funny is you talk about Colorado gets into power. The easy way to get the power would be displaced less economically useful stuff. It's like, whatever, buy up the aluminum smelting plant. And that has a gigawatt. And we're going to replace it with the data center because that's important. I mean, that's not actually happening because a lot of these power contracts are really sort of long-term locked in. Obviously, people don't like things like this. And so it sort of, it seems like in practice what it's requiring, at least right now, is building new power. That might change. And I think that that's when things get really interesting when it's like, no, we're just educating all of the power to the AGI. Anyway, so right now it's building new power. 10 gigawatt. I think quite doable. You know, it's like a few percent of like US natural gas production. When you have the 10 gigawatt clint chaining cluster, you have a lot more inference. So that starts getting more, you know, I think 100 gigawatt, that starts getting pretty wild. Again, it's like over 20% of US electricity production. I think it's pretty doable, especially if you're willing to go.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, in the open AI board events, employee powers exercise in a very direct democracy way. And I feel like that's how some of how that went about. I think really highlighted the benefits of representative democracy and having someone deliberative organs. Interesting.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sort of like the politicians and the generals and the sort of national security state. This is some of these classic scenes from the Oppenheimer movies, the scientists built it and then it was kind of the bomb was shipped away and it was out of their hands. I actually think it's good for lab employees to be aware of this. It's like you have a lot of power now. maybe not for that long and you know use it wisely I do think they would benefit from some more organs of representative democracy.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will they be in charge Some sense, this is, I mean, this is also the case in the US or whatever. This is sort of like rapidly depreciating influence of the lab employees. Like right now, the sort of AI lab employees have so much power over this, you know, like you started automated and then you saw this in November event, so much power, right? But both, I mean, both are going to get automated and they're going to lose all their power. And it'll just be kind of like a few people in charge with their sort of armies of automated eyes, but also.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does a son who tried to ride a motorcycle across the Iron Curtain and then was put in Nastasi prison for a while And then finally, you know, when she's almost 60, it was the first time she lives in a free country and a wealthy country. When I was a kid, she was the thing she always really didn't want me to do was get involved in politics because joining a political party was just, you know, it was very bad connotations for her. Anyway, and she sort of raised me when I was young, you know. And so it. It doesn't feel that long ago, it feels very close.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your point about history and sort of like living in America for the past eight years, I think this is one of the things I sort of took away from growing up in Germany is a lot of this stuff feels more visceral, right? My mother grew up in the former East, my father in the former West. They met shortly after the wall fell. The end of the Cold War was this sort of extremely pivotal moment for me because it's the reason I exist, right? And then growing up in Berlin and former wall, My great-grandmother who was still alive, it was very important in my life. She was born in 34, you know, grew up, you know, during the Nazi era, during, you know, all that, then World War II, you know, like saw the fire bombing of Dresden from the sort of, you know, country cottage or whatever where they as kids were, you know, then. Then spends most of her life in sort of the East German communist dictatorship. She'd tell me about 54 when there's like the popular uprising, you know, and Soviet tanks came in, you know, her.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideas can evolve, and there's sort of like some sense in which sort of time heals a lot of wounds and time, you know, and solves a lot of debates and a lot of people had really strong convictions, but a lot of those have been overturned by time because there's been this continued pluralism and evolution. I think there's a way in which kind of like, you know, if you take a CCP-like approach to kind of like truth, truth is what the party says, and you supercharge that with superintelligence. I think there's a way in which that could just be locked in and enshrined for a long time. And I think the possibilities are pretty terrifying.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and you know the. The possibilities for dictatorship with superintelligence are sort of even crazier, right? I think imagine you have a perfectly loyal military and security force. That's it. No more rebellions, right? No more popular uprisings, perfectly loyal. You have perfect lie detection, you have surveillance of everybody. You can perfectly figure out who's the dissenter, weed them out. No Gorbachev would have ever risen to power, who had some doubts about the system, no military coup would have ever happened. And I think you, I mean, I think there's a real way in which Know part of why things have worked out is that”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a real question on timing, right? Like, do they start taking this seriously when the intelligence explosion is already happening quite late? Or do they start taking this seriously two years earlier? And that matters a lot for how things play out. But at some point, they will. And at some point, they will realize that this will be sort of utterly decisive for... Know not just kind of like some proxy war somewhere, but you know, like whether liberal democracy can continue to thrive, whether, you know, whether the CCP will continue existing. And I think that will activate sort of forces that we haven't seen in a long time.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the question is will these sort of will people see that the stakes here are really, really high and that basically sort of like history is actually back? And I think the American national security state thinks very seriously about stuff like this. They think very seriously about competition with China. I think China very much thinks of itself on this or historical mission and rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Think a lot about national power. They think a lot about like the world order. And then, you know.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The history of the world is like, you know, like in World War II, right? It was like 50% of GDP went to, you know, like, you know, war per diamond production, the US borrowed over 60% of GDP, I think Germany and Japan over 100% World War I, you know, UK, Japan, sorry, UK, France, Germany all borrowed over 100% of GDP. Know, I think the sort of much more was on the line, right? Like, you know, and you know, people talk about World War I being so destructive and like 20 million Soviet soldiers dying and like 20% of Poland. But that was just the sort of like, that happened all the time, right? You know, like Seven Years War, like whatever, 20, 30% of Prussia died, you know, like 30 years' war, you know, like I think up to 50% of like large swath of Germany died.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, again, I think a lot of this really depends on sort of how much people are feeling it, how much people are seeing it. I think there's a thing where basically our generation, we're kind of so used to kind of basically peace and the world, American hegemony and nothing matters. You know, the sort of like extremely intense and these extraordinary things happening in the world and like intense international competition is like very much the historical norm. Like in some sense, it's like, you know, sort of this, there's this sort of 20-year, very unique period.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, look, I think in some sense this is a really key question. I think we have sort of a few more years of mid-game, basically. And where you have a few more 2023s, and that just starts updating more and more people. And, you know, I think, you know, the trend lines will become clear. I think you will see some amount of the sort of COVID dynamic, right? You know, like COVID was like February of 2020 honestly feels a lot like today where it's like it feels like this utterly crazy thing is about is impending is coming. You kind of see the exponential and yet most of the world just doesn't realize the mayor of New York is like go out to the shows and this is just Asian racism or whatever you know and and”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, you know, the fabs in the US, the constrained to skilled workers, right? You have the, even if you don't have robots, you have the cognitive superintelligence, and it can kind of make them all into skilled workers immediately. But that's a very brief period. Robots will come soon. Sure.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a little bit more, you know, it's a little bit more kind of like, you know, it's not like on and off. It's a little bit more gradual, but it's sort of like it's an explosion that starts narrowly. It can do cognitive jobs. The highest RI used for cognitive jobs is make the AI better, like solve robotics. And as you solve robotics, now you can do R&D and biology and other technology. Initially, you start with the factory workers that wearing the glasses and the airpods and the AI is instructing them because you kind of make any worker into a skilled technician. And then you have the robots come in. And anyway, so it sort of expands. This process expands.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At some point, I think people are going to realize that. Not yet, but they will, and when they will. I think there will be sort I don't think it'll just be the sort of AI researchers in charge. And I think the CCP is going to have an all-out effort to infiltrate American AI labs billions of dollars, thousands of people, full force of the sort of Ministry of State Security. CCP is going to try to outbuild us, right? Their power in China, the electric grid, they added a US complete as much power in the last decade as sort of entire US electric good. So the 100 gigawatt cluster, at least the 100 gigawatts is going to be a lot easier for them to get. And so I think sort of, you know, by this point, I think it's going to be extremely intense sort of international competition.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Superintelligence applied to sort of broad fields of RD and then the sort of industrial explosion as well. You have the robots. You're just making lots of material. I think that could compress. I mean, basically you compress kind of like a century worth of technological progress into less than a decade. And that means that a couple years could mean a sort of Gulf War I style advantage in military affairs. And including a decisive advantage that even preempts nukes, right? Suppose, how do you find the stealthy nuclear submarines? Like right now that's a problem of like you have sensors, you have the software to detect where they are. You can do that. You can find them. You have kind of like millions or billions of mosquito-like size drones. And they take out the nuclear submarines. They take out the mobile launchers. They take out the other nukes. And anyway, so I think enormously destabilizing, enormously important for national power.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will, I think, a couple years of lead could be utterly decisive and say military competition. If you look at Go Four One, Go Four One, Western Coalition forces, they had 100 to 1 kill ratio, right? And that was like, they had better sensors on their tanks, and they had better precision missiles, like GPS. And they had stealth. And they had sort of a few, you know, maybe 20, 30 years of technological lead, right? And they just completely crushed them.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you know that broadens, right? So you have this, you have this sort of initial acceleration of AI research that broadens to you apply R&D to a bunch of other fields of technology and the sort of like extreme, you know, at this point you have like a billion just super intelligent researchers, engineers, technicians, everything, superbly competent, all the things. They're going to figure out robotics. We talked about it being a software problem. Well, you know, you have a billion of super smart, smarter than the smartest human researchers, AI researchers on your cluster at some point during the intelligence explosion. They're going to be able to figure out robotics. And then, again, that expands. And I think if you play this picture forward, I think it is fairly unlike any other technology in that”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think fairly quickly, by default, you turn the crank one or two more times, and then you get a thing that's smarter than humans. But I think even more than just turning the crank a few crank a few more times, I think one of the first jobs to be automated is going to be that of sort of an AI researcher engineer. And if you can automate AI research, I think things can start going very fast. Right now there's already this trend of half an order of magnitude a year of algorithmic progress. Suppose at this point, you're going to have GPU fleets in the tens of millions for inference or more. And you're going to be able to run 100 million human equivalents of these sort of automated AI researchers. And if you can do that, you can maybe do a decade's worth of sort of ML research progress in a year. You get some sort of 10x speed up. And if you can do that, I think you can make the jump to kind of like AI that is vastly smarter than humans, you know, within a year, couple years.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even internationally Yeah, I don't know. Oh my god, like MMO score on that. What are you doing about this conversation? I think the question is when does the CCP and when does the sort of American national security establishment realize? That superintelligence is going to be absolutely decisive for national power, right? And this is where the sort of intelligence explosion stuff comes in, which we should also talk about later. It's sort of like, you know, you have AGI, you have the sort of drop-in room worker that can replace you or me, at least that sort of remote jobs and cognitive jobs. And then”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think the national security state is going to be starting to pay a lot of attention. And I hope we get to talk about that a little bit. Okay, let's talk about it now.”
2024-06-04 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source