Leopold Aschenbrenner: prediction

Transcript context

…There are reports, I think Microsoft. We'll get into it. So say the UAE gets a bunch of compute because we're building the clusters there. Let's say they have 25% of the compute. Why does a compute ratio matter? If it's about them being able to kick off the intelligence explosion, isn't it just some threshold where you have 100 million AI researchers or you don't? You can do a lot with 33 million extremely smart scientists. That might be enough to build the crazy bio weapons. Then you're in a situation where they stole the weights and they seized the compute. Now they can make these crazy new WMDs that will be possible with superintelligence. Now you've just proliferated the stuff that’ll be really powerful. Also, 3x on compute isn't actually that much. The riskiest situation is if we're in some sort of really neck and neck, feverish international struggle. Say we're really close with the CCP and we're months apart. The situation we want to be in — and could be in if we play our cards right — is a little bit more like the US building the atomic bomb versus the German project years behind. If we have that, we just have so much more wiggle room to get safety right. We're going to be building these crazy new WMDs that completely undermine nuclear deterrence. That's so much easier to deal with if you don't have somebody right on your tails and you have to go at maximum speed. You have no wiggle room. You're worried that at any time they can overtake you. They can also just try to outbuild you. They might literally win. China might literally win if they can steal the weights, because they can outbuild you. They may have less caution, both good and bad caution in terms of whatever unreasonable regulations we have. If you're in this really tight race, this sort of feverish struggle, that's when there's the greatest peril of self-destruction. Presumably the companies that are trying to build clusters in the Middle East realize this. Is it just that it’s impossible to do this in America? If you want American companies to do this at all, do you have to do it in the Middle East or not at all? Then you just have China build a Three Gorges Dam cluster.…

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