Leopold Aschenbrenner is an industry insider, who used to work for OpenAI on AI alignment problems, in a team lead by now famous Ilya Sutskever. He understands what is happening in the industry and especially how fast they are going.

The essays start by “AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible”. He explains how. It’s not only computational power increases, but algorithmic / research improvements. I like how he explains how alien these models could be, what we can understand with them and how is alignment done these days and why this exact strategy won’t work later down the line.

But there are some important parts where we differ in opinion.