Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized: My friend Leopold Aschenbrenner, who I got to know and respect on OpenAI’s now-disbanded Superalignment team before he left the company under disputed circumstances, just released “Situational Awareness,” one of the most extraordinary documents I’ve ever read. With unusual clarity, concreteness, and seriousness, and with a noticeably different style than the LessWrongers with whom he shares some key beliefs, Leopold sets out his vision of how AI is going to transform civilization over the next 5-10 years. He makes a case that, even after ChatGPT and all that followed it, the world still hasn’t come close to “pricing in” what’s about to hit it. We’re still treating this as a business and technology story like personal computing or the Internet, rather than (also) a national security story like the birth of nuclear weapons, except more so. And we’re still indexing on LLMs’ current capabilities (“fine, so they can pass physics exams, but they still can’t do original physics research“), rather than looking at the difference between now and five years ago, and then trying our best to project forward an additional five years.
Leopold makes an impassioned plea for the US to beat China and its other autocratic adversaries in the race to superintelligence, and to start by preventing frontier model weights from being stolen…
More here.
