Dwarkesh Podcast
Leopold Aschenbrenner - China/US Super Intelligence Race, 2027 AGI, & The Return of History
04 Jun 2024
Chatted with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner on the trillion dollar nationalized cluster, CCP espionage at AI labs, how unhobblings and scaling can lead to 2027 AGI, dangers of outsourcing clusters to Middle East, leaving OpenAI, and situational awareness.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes. Follow Leopold on Twitter.Timestamps(00:00:00) – The trillion-dollar cluster and unhobbling(00:20:31) – AI 2028: The return of history(00:40:26) – Espionage & American AI superiority(01:08:20) – Geopolitical implications of AI(01:31:23) – State-led vs. private-led AI(02:12:23) – Becoming Valedictorian of Columbia at 19(02:30:35) – What happened at OpenAI(02:45:11) – Accelerating AI research progress(03:25:58) – Alignment(03:41:26) – On Germany, and understanding foreign perspectives(03:57:04) – Dwarkesh’s immigration story and path to the podcast(04:07:58) – Launching an AGI hedge fund(04:19:14) – Lessons from WWII(04:29:08) – Coda: Frederick the Great Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Okay. Today I'm chatting with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner. He grew up in Germany, graduated valedictorian of Columbia when he was 19, and then he had a very interesting gap year, which we'll talk about. Then he was on the OpenAI super alignment team, may it rest in peace.
Now he, with some anchor investments from Patrick and John Collison and Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, is launching an investment firm. So Leopold, I know you're off to a slow start, but life is long and I wouldn't worry about it too much. You'll make up for it in due time. But thanks for coming on the podcast. Thank you.
You know, I first discovered your podcast when your best episode had, you know, like a couple hundred views. And so it's just been it's been amazing to follow your trajectory. And it's a delight to be on.
Yeah. Well, I think in the shelter in Trenton episode, I mentioned that a lot of the things I've learned about AI, I've learned from talking with them. The third part of this triumvirate, probably the most significant in terms of the things that I've learned about AI has been you. We'll get all this stuff on the record now. Great.
First thing I had to get on record, tell me about the trillion-dollar cluster. But by the way, I should mention, so the context of this podcast is today there's you're releasing a series called Situational Awareness. We're going to get into it. First question about that is tell me about the trillion dollar cluster.
Yeah, so unlike basically most things that have come out of Silicon Valley recently, AI is kind of this industrial process. The next model doesn't just require some code. It's building a giant new cluster. Now it's building giant new power plants. Pretty soon it's going to be building giant new fabs.
And, you know, since ChatGPT, this kind of extraordinary sort of techno capital acceleration has been set into motion. I mean, basically, you know, exactly a year ago today, you know, NVIDIA had their first kind of blockbuster earnings call, right? Where it like went out 25% after hours and everyone was like, oh my God, AI, it's a thing.
You know, I mean, I think within a year, you know, NVIDIA data center revenue has gone from like, you know, a few billion a quarter to like, you know, 20, 25 billion a quarter now. And, you know, continuing to go up like, you know, big tech CapEx is skyrocketing. It's funny because there's this crazy scramble going on, but in some sense, it's just the continuation of straight lines on a graph.
There's this long run trend, basically almost a decade of training compute of the largest AI systems growing by about half an order of magnitude, 0.5 booms a year. And you can just kind of play that forward, right? So, you know, GPT-4, you know, rumored or reported to have finished pre-training in 2022.
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