Summary of Situational Awareness - The Decade Ahead
Much of the first AGI’s efforts will likely be directed towards further AI research. But once superintelligences exist, they will likely also spend considerable subjective time on other fields. This could look like compressing the equivalent of all of 20th-century technological progress into a few years.
AI will increasingly require huge amounts of capital expenditure on data centres, energy, and semiconductor fabs. Based on naive (but plausible) trend extrapolation, we can estimate some numbers for the latest single training run in each year:
“An AI model is just a large file of numbers on a server. This can be stolen. All it takes an adversary to match your trillions of dollars and your smartest minds and your decades of work is to steal this file.”
“Our generation too easily takes for granted that we live in peace and freedom. And those who herald the age of AGI in SF too often ignore the elephant in the room: superintelligence is a matter of national security, and the United States must win.”
