Leopold Aschenbrenner

German-born investor and former OpenAIOpenAI, prop. n.: The American company that makes ChatGPT and the GPT models. It began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab and is now a for-profit company overseen by a nonprofit foundation. researcher, author of the essay series Situational Awareness: The Decade AheadSituational Awareness (essay), prop. n.: A long 2024 essay by a former OpenAI researcher arguing that AGI could arrive around 2027, that superintelligence could follow soon after, and that the US government should run a national AGI project. (June 2024). After graduating from Columbia University at 19 as valedictorian, he worked on economics research and for the FTX Future Fund before joining OpenAI's superalignmentsuperalignment, n.: The problem of keeping AI systems far smarter than humans aligned with human intentions — and the name of OpenAI's short-lived 2023–2024 research team devoted to it. team in 2023; he was dismissed in April 2024 over what OpenAI called leaking, a characterization he disputed. The essays counted orders of magnitude of effective computeeffective compute, n.: A way of measuring AI progress that counts better methods as if they were extra computing power: if a new technique lets a model match one trained with twice the computing, it counts as doubling effective compute. and of unhobblingunhobbling, n.: Fixing the simple ways a capable AI model is held back — such as by giving it tools, memory or time to think — so that abilities it already has can actually be used. gains to predict artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive. around 2027, followed quickly by superintelligencesuperintelligence, n.: A mind, usually imagined as an AI, that would leave even the cleverest people far behind in nearly every kind of thinking, not just in one game or skill. None is known to exist. through automated AI researchautomated AI research, n.: Using AI systems to do the work of AI researchers, such as running experiments and writing code for new models, so that AI helps build its own successors.; argued that a data walldata wall, n.: The worry that AI companies will run out of new human-written text to train ever-larger models on, because the useful public internet has already been largely used up. would not halt progress; called for national-security-grade protection of model weightsmodel weight security, n.: Protecting the files that make up a trained AI model — its learned numbers — from being stolen or leaked, because whoever holds them can run, copy or alter the model. and algorithmic secrets; and predicted that the US government would launch a Manhattan Project-style effort, which he called the Project. He then founded an investment firm named Situational Awareness.