Accelerating to 2027?

The AI Debate is on Fire

I had not heard of Leopold Aschenbrenner until yesterday. I was meeting with Faraj Aalaei (a SignalRank board member) and my colleague Rob Hodgkinson when they began to talk about “Situational Awareness,” his essay on the future of AGI, and its likely speed of emergence.

So I had to read it, and it is this week’s essay of the week. He starts his 165-page epic with:

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.

So, Leopold is not humble. He finds himself “among” the few people with situational awareness.

As a person prone to bigging up myself, I am not one to prematurely judge somebody’s view of self. So, I read all 165 pages.

He makes one point. The growth of AI capability is accelerating. More is being done at a lower cost, and the trend will continue to be super-intelligence by 2027. At that point, billions of skilled bots will solve problems at a rate we cannot imagine. And they will work together, with little human input, to do so.