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Fired Superalignment Researcher Drops Four-and-a-Half Hour Podcast With Dwarkesh Patel, 165-Page Manifesto.
[Podcast] [Manifesto]
Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated valedictorian at Columbia in 2021 at the age of 19. He then worked for the FTX Future Fund before the fiasco, then wound up at OpenAI on the Superalignment team. In April of this year, he was fired, ostensibly for "leaking". In Leopold's telling, he was fired for voicing security concerns (not to be confused with safety concerns) directly to the board. At post-coup OpenAI, being the kind of guy who would write a manifesto is a massive liability. Private interpretation of the Charter is forbidden.
Leopold's thesis is that AGI is coming soon, but that national security concerns, not alignment, are the main threat. A major theme is how easy it would be for the CCP to gain access to critical AI-related capabilities secrets via espionage given the current state of security at frontier AI labs. I was a bit confused at the time of the firing as to what Eliezer meant by calling Leopold a "political opponent", but it is very clear in retrospect. Leopold wants to accelerate AI progress in the name of Western dominance, making America the "compute cluster of democracy". He is very concerned that lax security or a failure to keep our eyes on the prize could cost us our lead in the AI arms race.
What comes through in the podcast in a way that doesn't from the manifesto is how intellectually formidable Leopold seems. He is thoughtful and sharp at all times and for all questions. Admittedly I may be biased. Leopold is thoroughly Gray Tribe ingroup. He has been on Richard Hanania's podcast, and mentions Tyler Cowen as one of his influences. It is tempting to simply nod along as the broad outline of the next 5 years is sketched out, as if the implications of approaching AGI are straightforward and incontrovertible.
The one thing that is notably missing is are-we-the-baddies? style self-reflection. The phrase, "millions or billions of mosquito-sized drones", is uttered at one point. It makes sense in the military context of the conversation, but I really think more time should have been spent on the political, social, and ethical implications. He seems to think that we will still be using something like the US Constitution as the operating system of the post-AGI global order, which seems... unlikely. Maybe disillusionment with the political system is one of those things that can't be learned from a book, and can only come with age and experience.
I’m skeptical that the current LLM strand of AI is going to accomplish much but I absolutely agree that the US and West more generally should devote a lot of energy to attaining AI dominance. Life for almost everyone except for a few insider Han Chinese will be much much better off if the West gets there first. AI aligned with the American blue tribe will force red tribe Americans to watch black Superman; AI aligned with the American red tribe will force blue tribe Americans to drive pickup trucks; AI aligned with the CCP will kill or enslave every non-Han.
Unless you're a Marxist-Leninist, which would presumably make you the first on this forum, this rather depends on the assumption that CPC's formal commitment to Marxism-Leninism, an ideology which historically has had a great deal of ideas what to do worldwide, is completely an empty letter and will remain so indefinitely.
I certainly hope that it is, but can't know for sure. That said, I believe a country with one of the most advanced capitalist economies in history is functionally extremely different than the USSR, and I feel much more comfortable being bullish on it.
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