Leopold Aschenbrenner: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Why does it matter that it's in the US? There are some people who are trying to build clusters elsewhere. There's a lot of free-flowing Middle Eastern money that's trying to build clusters elsewhere. This comes back to the national security question we talked about. Would you do the Manhattan Project in the UAE? You can put the clusters in the US and you can put them in allied democracies. Once you put them in authoritarian dictatorships, you create this irreversible security risk. Once the cluster is there, it's much easier for them to exfiltrate the weights. They can literally steal the AGI, the superintelligence. It’s like they got a direct copy of the atomic bomb. It makes it much easier for them. They have weird ties to China. They can ship that to China. That's a huge risk. Another thing is they can just seize the compute. The issue here is people right now are thinking of this as ChatGPT, Big Tech product clusters. The clusters being planned now, three to five years out, may well be the AGI, superintelligence clusters. When things get hot, they might just seize the compute. Suppose we put 25% of the compute capacity in these Middle Eastern dictatorships. Say they seize that. Now it's a ratio of compute of 3:1. We still have more, but even with only 25% of compute there it starts getting pretty hairy. 3:1 is not that great of a ratio. You can do a lot with that amount of compute. Say they don't actually do this. Even if they don't actually seize the compute, even if they actually don't steal the weights, there's just a lot of implicit leverage you get. They get seats at the AGI table. I don't know why we're giving authoritarian dictatorships the seat at the AGI table. There's going to be a lot of compute in the Middle East if these deals go through. First of all, who is it? Is it just every single Big Tech company trying to figure it out over there?…

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