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Leopold Aschenbrenner: belief

4 Jun 2024 Dwarkesh Podcast Leopold Aschenbrenner — 2027 AGI, China/US super-intelligence race, & the return of history

“There’s some amount of agency. I think in a funny way, this is what I took away from my Germany experience.”

— Leopold Aschenbrenner

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
belief
Recorded
4 Jun 2024
Publisher
Dwarkesh Podcast

Transcript context

…When I had a couple of videos with a few hundred views. It’s a small world. This is the crazy thing about the AI world. It’s the same few people at the parties running the models at DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. Some of our friends, now successful in their careers, met many of the people who are now successful in Silicon Valley before their twenties or in their early twenties. Why is it a small world? There’s some amount of agency. I think in a funny way, this is what I took away from my Germany experience. It was crushing. I didn’t like it. Skipping grades and moving to the US were unusual moves. Just trying to do it, and then seeing it work, reinforced the idea that you don’t have to conform to the Overton window. You can try to do what seems right to you, even if most people are wrong. That was a valuable and formative early experience. After college, what did you do?…

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