Leopold Aschenbrenner

In the popular imagination, the AI alignment debate is between those who say everything is hopeless, and others who tell us there is nothing to worry about.

Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated valedictorian from Columbia in 2021 when he was only 19 years old. He is currently a research affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and previously helped run Future Fund, which works on philanthropy in AI and biosecurity.

He contends that, contrary to popular perceptions, there aren’t that many people working on the alignment issue. Not only that, but he argues that the problem is actually solvable. In this podcast, he discusses what he believes some of the most promising paths forward are. Even if there is only a small probability that AI is dangerous, a small chance of existential risk is something to take seriously.

AI is not all potential downsides. Near the end, the discussion turns to the possibility that it may supercharge a new era of economic growth. Aschebrenner and Hanania discuss fundamental questions of how well GDP numbers still capture what we want to measure, the possibility that regulation strangles AI to death, and whether the changes we see in the coming decades will be on the same scale as the internet or more important.

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Chatted with my friend Leopold Aschenbrenner about the trillion dollar cluster, unhobblings + scaling = 2027 AGI, CCP espionage at AI labs, leaving OpenAI and starting an AGI investment firm, dangers of outsourcing clusters to the Middle East, & The Project.

Timestamps
00:00:00 The trillion-dollar cluster and unhobbling
00:21:20 AI 2028: The return of history
00:41:15 Espionage & American AI superiority
01:09:09 Geopolitical implications of AI
01:32:12 State-led vs. private-led AI
02:13:12 Becoming Valedictorian of Columbia at 19
02:31:24 What happened at OpenAI
02:46:00 Intelligence explosion
03:26:47 Alignment
03:42:15 On Germany, and understanding foreign perspectives
03:57:53 Dwarkesh's immigration story and path to the podcast
04:03:16 Random questions
04:08:47 Launching an AGI hedge fund
04:20:03 Lessons from WWII
04:29:57 Coda: Frederick the Great

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