The Best Read of the Year: Situational Awareness
Jun 05, 2024 @ 3:05 pm
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Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former safety researcher at ChatGPT creator OpenAI, has published a stunning series of articles forecasting Artificial Generalized Intelligence (AGI) – followed very shortly by Arficial Generalized Superintelligence (ASI) by 2027.
And he has a lot of charts, graphs, and links to explain his reasoning.
The paper is available online here:
Just reading the summaries is amazing. Here are the summaries for the first two articles:
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.
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.
And you’re only on part 2 of 10 at that point.


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