Leopold Aschenbrenner: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? The Middle East does offer capital, but America has plenty of capital. We have trillion-dollar companies. What are these Middle Eastern states? They're kind of like trillion-dollar oil companies. We have trillion-dollar companies and very deep financial markets. Microsoft could issue hundreds of billions of dollars of bonds and they can pay for these clusters. Another argument being made, which is worth taking seriously, is that if we don't work with the UAE or with these Middle Eastern countries, they're just going to go to China. They're going to build data centers and pour money into AI regardless. If we don't work with them, they'll just support China. There's some merit to the argument in the sense that we should be doing benefit-sharing with them. On the road to AGI, there should be two tiers of coalitions. There should be a narrow coalition of democracies that's developing AGI. Then there should be a broader coalition of other countries, including dictatorships, and we should offer them some of the benefits of AI. If the UAE wants to use AI products, run Meta recommendation engines, or run the last-generation models, that's fine. By default, they just wouldn't have had this seat at the AGI table. So they have some money, but a lot of people have money. The only reason they're getting this seat at the AGI table and giving these dictators this leverage over this extremely important national security technology, is because we're getting them excited and offering it to them. Who specifically is doing this? Who are the companies who are going there to fundraise?…

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