The Neuron: AI Explained
“Artificial General Intelligence Is Coming”, Ex-OpenAI Leopold Aschenbrenner, Situational Awareness
06 Jun 2024
Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner has released a series of essays talking about how he sees AI playing out and what we should all do about it. Pete digs into his extremely impressive background and his arguments around why we’re about to get AGI. Transcripts: https://www.theneuron.ai/podcast Subscribe to the best newsletter on AI: https://theneurondaily.com Listen to The Neuron: https://lnk.to/theneuron Watch The Neuron on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@theneuronai
Full Episode
Welcome to the Neuron. I'm Pete Huang. Today, in April, an open AI researcher was fired for allegedly leaking important information. Now he's going public with his take on the future of AI. Are we in for world disaster?
It's Thursday, June 6th. Let's dive in.
If you work in the tech industry in San Francisco, you're surrounded by some of the most talented people in the world. And I mean that very literally. You could walk into a party and all of a sudden there's this one person who researched this crazy new material. There's another person who started this amazingly large company.
These people are everywhere here, and you get kinda used to it until every once in a while you read the background of someone and you're reminded of how insane it all is. Leopold Aschenbrenner is one of the most recent versions of those types of people to me. Until recently, he was just a name on paper for me.
I mean, back in April, the information had reported that he and another researcher at OpenAI were fired for leaking, and that was pretty much the extent of my exposure to him. And then I got to reading about his background and his work. And boy, this is one of those people that you're just blown away by. So here we go.
Leopold Aschenbrenner from Germany, really curious student, extremely sharp, would be one of those kids that would push for more and keep digging at topics at school. did quiz bowl and debate and science competitions. For one of his science projects, he and a teammate built a system that would track and warn and notify you about fine dust levels in Berlin.
And that won the top spot in all of Berlin that year. Leopold then goes to college in the US at age 15. He's at Columbia University studying statistics, economics, mathematics. 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.
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