Noah Smith: Most of Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI predictions have been proven wrong
Noah Smith · Dwarkesh Patel and Noah Smith on AGI and the Economy · Aug 4, 2025 · at 54:37
Economic commentator Noah Smith criticizes the predictive accuracy of former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner's 'Situational Awareness' paper on the a16z Podcast.
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“I would say that already most of the things he predicted have been invalidated or made irrelevant in the last year and a half, like, and especially in terms, like all the comp stuff about competition with China you know, like it turns out filtration was able to get them a whole lot of things that he never predicted. It turns out that like so many of the things other than just the idea that AI would keep getting better, which he predicts and a lot of people predict, but then It, I feel like a lot of the specific predictions about us capabilities and Chinese capabilities and what would be the bottlenecks and what would be the things that, you know, we had like, here's how we can compete with China. That's all been proven wrong since.”
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