Top all-time · #1453
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Personal blog · situational-awareness.aiaieconomicssecurity
Leopold Aschenbrenner writes SITUATIONAL AWARENESS, a personal blog at situational-awareness.ai about ai, economics and security. Since 2024, 49 different Hacker News readers have linked it 60 times, most often “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (22) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness essays, including 'From GPT-4 to AGI' and 'The Decade Ahead', for arguments that AI scaling trends point toward AGI within a few years.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Credited with a prediction that came true; called a good job of laying out the trend argument; one commenter urges readers to read it and judge.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 22 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, June 2024 You can see the future first in San Francisco. Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans. Behind the scene
Most-linked posts?
- Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2024-06-04
- Situational Awareness [pdf]14 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2024-06-04
- From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2024-06-05
- /5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-06-09
- Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-09-30
What Hacker News says?
I wish I could agree with you. But have you read Aschenbrenner's "Situational Awareness" [1]? I am very much afraid that the big decision makers in AI do in fact think in those terms, and do not in any way frame this as fair competition for the benefit of all. 1. https://situational-awareness.ai/
Comment linking /
on “Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers”Submitted Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead as a story · 81 points
HN discussionLeopold Aschenbrenner predicted it last June. https://situational-awareness.ai/racing-to-the-trillion-doll...
Comment linking /racing-to-the-trillion-dollar-cluster/
on “Stargate Project: SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, MGX to build data centers”Submitted From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs as a story · 35 points
HN discussionIf by “several” orders of magnitude, you mean 3-5, then we might be there by 2030 or earlier. https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/
Comment linking /from-gpt-4-to-agi/
on “AI 2027”Submitted From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs as a story · 24 points
HN discussionThis one ? https://situational-awareness.ai/parting-thoughts/ There are some big differences with the atom bomb though : A lot of people have been talking about AGI / the Singularity for decades, and that essay is yet another example. Not sure if it's the hindsight talking, but the situation with (un)controlling fission was much clearer ? We knew it was at least theoretically possible. And the first test was very pr…
Comment linking /parting-thoughts/
on “Google commits to buying power generated by nuclear-energy startup Kairos Power”Submitted Situational Awareness [pdf] as a story · 17 points
HN discussion> Who would have thought that vectorized linear algebra will be at the center of so much financial speculation? "vectorized linear algebra" is at the root of most of modern Physics. Specifically, the laws of Physics are represented by the Lie groups U(1), SU(2), SU(3) and SO(3,1). While the manifolds that Physics act on are curved, they're "locally flat". That is why local operations are tensor operations. Or linear…
Comment linking /
on “Ilya Sutskever's SSI Inc raises $1B”Submitted S I T U A T I O N A L A W A R E N E S S by Leopold Aschenbrenner [pdf] as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> What we have right now is impressive, but no one has shown anything close to a possible path from where we are right now to AGI[0]. [0]: From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/
Comment linking /from-gpt-4-to-agi/
on “The Intelligence Age”Submitted From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIt's their own decisions they made long before the controls and presure. Besides being in bed with the US gov, people that run big AI shops tend to be fervently nationalistic and politically ambitious on their own. Leopold Aschenbrenner's dystopian rant [1] or Dario Amodei's [2] [3] are pretty representative. [1] https://situational-awareness.ai/ [2] https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace [3] htt…
Comment linking /
on “State of AI: An Empirical 100T Token Study with OpenRouter”Submitted Leopold Aschenbrenner, Situational Awareness: the Decade Ahead [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionGood article, the METR metric is very interesting. See also Leopold Aschenbrenner's work in the same vein: https://situational-awareness.ai/from-gpt-4-to-agi/ IMO this approach ultimately asks the wrong question. Every exponential trend in history has eventually flattened out. Every. single. one. Two rabbits would create a population with a mass greater than the Earth in a couple of years if that trend continues ind…
Comment linking /from-gpt-4-to-agi/
on “Failing to Understand the Exponential, Again”Submitted Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead as a story · 3 points
HN discussionA well reasoned article that fundamentally downplays both the pace of innovation and the exponential increase in capabilities per dollar happening over time. AI is rapidly accelerating its improvement rate, and I do believe its capabilities will continue growing exponentially. In particular, GPT-2 to GPT-4 spans an increase from 'well read toddler' to 'average high school student' in just a few years, while simultan…
Comment linking /
on “How Does OpenAI Survive?”Submitted Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI think ground-zero for that line of thought is with Leopold Aschenbrenner[0]. Who I believe now runs an AI focused hedge fund. [0] https://situational-awareness.ai
Comment linking /
on “Grok 3: Another win for the bitter lesson”Submitted Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis website by a former OpenAI employee was arguing that a combination of hardware scaling, algorithmic improvements, etc would all combine to yield AGI in the near future: https://situational-awareness.ai/
Comment linking /
on “LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns”Submitted Situational Awareness [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis is a bit outdated. Some of the young people described in the article actually became top researchers, engineers, and managers in AI companies, and their beliefs are used as a justification for the potential regulatory capture and geopolitical games. They also have a massive conflict of interest: AI will play a huge role in your life in the upcoming years whether you want it or not, and they will control it. So…
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on “Someone is wrong on the internet (AGI Doom edition)”Submitted Situational Awareness [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionImportant context, this appears to be a brief intro+table of contents for a 165-page pdf/html book.[0] It’ll probably be easy for HN to take potshots at snippets of the intro, but the writing intrigued me enough that I want to at least skim over the whole thing. [0] pdf link for reference, but the html navigation seems pretty clean in the OP link as well. https://situational-awareness.ai/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/.…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2024/06/situationalawareness.pdf
on “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”Submitted Situational Awareness: The decade ahead [pdf] as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSee situational-awareness[1], see the "algorithmic efficiencies" section. He shows many examples of how models are getting cheaper. With many citations. Costs are not just down on a specific service. Even though I don't see the problem in that, as long as you get the promised level of performance, without being subsidised. See the deepseek model I linked above. It's an open model and you can run it yourself. > At be…
Comment linking /from-gpt-4-to-agi/
on “AI and Startup Moats”Submitted Superalignment (Situational Awareness) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFor an opposing view, see Leopold Aschenbrenner’s recently released “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”: https://situational-awareness.ai He did a very long interview with Dwarkesh Patel, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdbVtZIn9IM
Comment linking /
on “AI Appears to Rapidly Be Approaching Brick Wall Where It Can't Get Smarter”Submitted Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
