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Published · transcript-backed

Leopold Aschenbrenner: uncertainty

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

“I don’t know but if you try to map out how expensive the 10 GW cluster would be, that’s a couple of hundred billion.”

— Leopold Aschenbrenner

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Everything needed to verify it.

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

Transcript context

…Is that 1 GW? Or is that 10 GW? I don’t know but if you try to map out how expensive the 10 GW cluster would be, that’s a couple of hundred billion. It’s sort of on that scale and they’re planning it. It’s not just my crazy take. AMD forecasted a $400 billion AI accelerator market by 2027. AI accelerators are only part of the expenditures. We’re very much on track for a $1 trillion of total AI investment by 2027. The $1 trillion cluster will take a bit more acceleration. We saw how much ChatGPT unleashed. Every generation, the models are going to be crazy and shift the Overton window. Then the revenue comes in. These are forward-looking investments. The question is, do they pay off? Let’s estimate the GPT-4 cluster at around $500 million. There’s a common mistake people make, saying it was $100 million for GPT-4. That’s just the rental price. If you’re building the biggest cluster, you have to build and pay for the whole cluster. You can’t just rent it for three months. Can’t you?…

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