Pete Huang

Fast forward another two years, Leopold is now 19.

He's graduating from Columbia University, top of his class.

He's named valedictorian, and he wins best senior thesis in economics, obviously.

I mean, this dude is stacked, right?

Leopold spends a few years after graduation continuing with research in economics and thinking about these big questions about the future of humanity and technology.

Of course, he's moved to California, to the Bay Area.

And in 2023, he joins OpenAI on the SuperAlignment team.

It's the team that OpenAI started in July of that year with a promise to dedicate 20% of their computing resources and a four-year goal to solve this question of making sure AI helps humanity rather than hurting it.

Very in line with the type of questions that Leopold was thinking about in college.

And this team, by the way, the Super Alignment team, is the team that recently got disbanded after its two leads, Ilya Suskever and Jan Laika, both decided to leave OpenAI.

Let's talk about why we're talking about Leopold Aschenbrenner today.

This week, Leopold released a series of essays that has generated a ton of buzz in the AI and broader tech community.

It has to do with the bigger question about AI.

Just how powerful is AI going to get and what are we going to do about it?

Leopold's general argument is this, that we are on our way to super intelligent AI, we are not on track to do this safely, we need the government involved, and China is going to be out to get us on this.

Oh, and by the way, Leopold is also starting a hedge fund to make investments based on the stuff he sees relating to AI.

That's sort of a separate thing.

Now, if you look at his actual writing, it's a pretty dense set of essays.

So today I want to walk you through what he's saying and the sort of back and forth that has happened since then.

First, let's talk about AI.