Pete Huang

And of course, he thinks it's completely normal to be there at 15.

He fits right in.

At age 17, between his sophomore and junior years, he publishes a paper, a 100-page thesis titled Existential Risk and Growth.

And in this paper, he's arguing that some of the technology available to humans today could actually threaten human survival and that ultimately faster economic growth will reduce that risk because we can spend more on safety measures.

Remember, this guy is 17 years old and he's spending his days thinking about the relationship between economic growth and human survival.

I don't think there are many 17 year olds in the world that are doing that.

Now this paper gets picked up by a prominent economist named Tyler Cohen who literally says, look, this paper of yours would have been impressive if it was coming out of an MIT PhD program.

Dude, you are 17.

You are a legend of an economics researcher.

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.