Scaling Laws & Compute · 2024

Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead

Leopold Aschenbrenner

Extrapolated compute, algorithmic-efficiency, and investment trendlines to argue that broadly human-level AI could arrive within a few years, and drew out the national-security implications.

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Plain-language summary

The long essay projects the straight lines on graphs of training compute and efficiency forward, argues that the gap from current models to human-level research assistants is a few more orders of magnitude, and discusses security and governance consequences. It is a prediction and advocacy piece, not an empirical result, and its timelines are contested. It captured a strand of frontier-lab thinking in 2024.

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Provenance

Record ID
P-512
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.