Leopold Aschenbrenner: belief

Transcript context

…It was really interesting. You had people from the Detroit auto industry side, like William Knudsen, who were running mobilization for the United States. They were extremely competent. At the same time you had labor organization and agitation, which is very analogous to the climate change pledges and concerns we have today. They would literally have these strikes, into 1941, costing millions of man-hours worth of time when we're trying to make tens of thousands of planes a month. They would just debilitate factories for trivial concessions from capital that were pennies on the dollar. There were concerns that the auto companies were trying to use the pretext of a potential war to prevent paying labor the money it deserves. So with what climate change is today, you might think, "ah, America's fucked. We're not going to be able to build this shit if you look at NEPA or something,” I didn't realize how debilitating labor was in World War II. It wasn’ just that. Before 1939, the American military was in total shambles. You read about it and it reads a little bit like the German military today. Military expenditures were I think less than 2% of GDP. All the European countries had gone, even in peacetime, above 10% of GDP. It was rapid mobilization starting from nothing. We were making no planes. There were no military contracts. Everything had been starved during the Great Depression. But there was this latent capacity. At some point the United States got its act together. This applies the other way around too with China. Sometimes people count them out a little bit with the export controls and so on. They're able to make 7-nanometer chips now. There's a question of how many they could make. There's at least a possibility that they're going to mature that ability and make a lot of 7-nanometer chips. There's a lot of latent industrial capacity in China. They are able to build a lot of power fast. Maybe that isn't activated for AI yet. At some point, the same way the United States and a lot of people in the US government are going to wake up, the CCP is going to wake up. Companies realize that scaling is a thing. Obviously their whole plans are contingent on scaling. So they understand that in 2028 we're going to be building 10 GW data centers. At that point, the people who can keep up are Big Tech, potentially at the edge of their capabilities, sovereign wealth fund-funded things, and also major countries like America and China. What's their plan? With the AI labs, what's their plan given this landscape? Do they not want the leverage of being in the United States?…

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