Leopold Aschenbrenner's "Situational Awareness": AI from now to 2034
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
Leopold Aschenbrenner — formerly of OpenAI's Superalignment team, now founder of an investment firm focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) — has posted a massive, provocative essay putting a long lens on AI's future.
Why it matters: Aschenbrenner, based in San Francisco, relies on lots of speculation and projection. So none of this is set in stone. But his opus is a useful, eye-opening synthesis of high-level Silicon Valley conversations.
Here are 10 takeaways that leaped out in Aschenbrenner's 50,000-word, five-chapter, 165-page paper, "Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead":
1. "Trust the trendlines ... The trendlines are intense, and they were right."
- "The magic of deep learning is that it just works — and the trendlines have been astonishingly consistent, despite naysayers at every turn."
2. "Over and over again, year after year, skeptics have claimed 'deep learning won't be able to do X' and have been quickly proven wrong."
- "If there's one lesson we've learned from the past decade of AI, it's that you should never bet against deep learning."
- "We're literally running out of benchmarks."
3. It's "strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer."
4. "By 2027, rather than a chatbot, you're going to have something that looks more like an agent, like a coworker."
5. The data wall: "There is a potentially important source of variance for all of this: we're running out of internet data. That could mean that, very soon, the naive approach to pretraining larger language models on more scraped data could start hitting serious bottlenecks."
6. "AI progress won't stop at human-level … We would rapidly go from human-level to vastly superhuman AI systems."
- Superintelligence, coming in 2030 A.D.?
7. AI products are likely to become "the biggest revenue driver for America's largest corporations, and by far their biggest area of growth. Forecasts of overall revenue growth for these companies would skyrocket."
- "Stock markets would follow; we might see our first $10T company soon thereafter. Big tech at this point would be willing to go all out, each investing many hundreds of billions (at least) into further AI scaleout. We probably [will] see our first many-hundred-billion-dollar corporate bond sale."
8. "Our failure today to erect sufficient barriers around research on artificial general intelligence "will be irreversible soon: in the next 12-24 months, we will leak key AGI breakthroughs to the [Chinese Communist Party]. It will be the national security establishment's single greatest regret before the decade is out."
9. Superintelligence "will be the United States' most important national defense project."
10. There's "no crack team coming to handle this. ... Right now, there's perhaps a few hundred people in the world who realize what's about to hit us, who understand just how crazy things are about to get, who have situational awareness."
Reality check: Aschenbrenner, with roots in the effective altrusim movement, is an AI investor. So he's not a disinterested party.
- His perspective on AGI is a minority in the industry, Axios managing editor Scott Rosenberg tells me. Aschenbrenner, and many at OpenAI and elsewhere, believe AGI will inevitably develop out of today's genAI language models and bots. The wider consensus among experts is that it won't.
- That's not pessimism: The consensus sees so much value and utility in AI where it is now, and where it's headed long before it gets to AGI, that AGI isn't really the point.
Get Axios AI+, our daily newsletter ... Go deeper: Axios explanation of AI vs. AGI ... Read Aschenbrenner's essay.
