Episode Details
Back to Episodes“How did Leo do? Evaluating Situational Awareness’s predictions” by Jamie_Harris
Description
In June 2024, Leopold Aschenbrenner published Situational Awareness, a 165-page essay predicting AGI by 2027, trillion-dollar compute clusters, an inevitable US/China AI arms race, and a world not remotely prepared. It was influential on many people's thinking about AI timelines and risks, including my own.
It's now almost two years later. I was curious: how have the predictions actually held up?
What we did
I got Claude to go through the essay's key claims and check each against the best available evidence as of March 2026. The substantive analysis is Claude's (plus 2 rounds of red-teaming by Gemini) drawing on web search results and the original piece. I just provided the prompts, the framing, and iterated on the presentation over several rounds.
The result is an interactive artifact that lets you explore each prediction theme, with charts, tables, sources, and an analysis section at the end.
View the artifact hereIf you disagree with specific assessments, or know of more thorough analyses of SA's track record that I should link to, I'd welcome that in the comments!
Some key findings
- Infrastructure investment and algorithmic efficiency are tracking ahead of his predictions.
- AI capabilities on benchmarks have broadly met [...]
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Outline:
(00:43) What we did
(01:28) Some key findings
(02:47) What youll find in the artifact
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First published:
March 29th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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