I didn't get the whole way through the interview, but I'm very skeptical of Leopold's views.
> Six months ago, 10 GW was the talk of the town. Now, people have moved on. 10 GW is happening. There’s The Information report on OpenAI and Microsoft planning a $100 billion cluster.
This sounds very miscalibrated for two reasons.
1) Datacenters and power plants are very complicated pieces of infrastructure. You need various kinds state approval and geological surveys and civil engineering contractors and so on, which mean you need a full time operations team running for several years. At the scale we're talking about, you start needing to buy first-of-a-kind power plant hardware that has to first be custom engineered. Even the ~$100mm datacenters at my workplace require a full time team and take years to build out. (Also re: the later point that you can buy up power-hungry aluminium smelters in structural decline, I agree, except by a sort of efficient markets argument, why hasn't this already been done for previous datacenters? What changes now? I feel like there's a Chesterton's fence here.)
2) Reading a report from The Information about $100bn of capex and taking it at face value is very questionable. That's multiple times Microsoft's annual capex budget; if they do spend that much there will be signs of it that Wall St analysts will start seeing many months in advance.
> For the average knowledge worker, it’s a few hours of productivity a month. You have to be expecting pretty lame AI progress to not hit a few hours of productivity a month.
I think very few knowledge workers would pay $100/mo not just because it's a huge amount, but because of differentiated pricing: the marginal value of the $100 model isn't enough above the $10 model for most individuals to justify.
That said I think if these models get good enough we will see a lot of enterprise / site licenses for LLMs that could go up to this price, because an employer is willing to pay more for worker productivity than workers. But I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of the more valuable contracts go to wrapper LLMs run by LexisNexis and Elsevier affiliates and the likes, because competition can commoditise LLMs leaving the producer surplus flowing to the IP owners.
But taking a step back, it feels weird to me to assume that you'd raise copilot prices to fund $100bn in capex. If you need $100bn that bad just save it up or sell some bonds or take a GPU-secured loan from a consortium of banks; there is no principled reason to risk losing the copilot market by raising prices too early.
> The question is, when does the CCP and when does the American national security establishment realize that superintelligence is going to be absolutely decisive for national power? This is where the intelligence explosion stuff comes in, which we should talk about later.
Neither establishment is asleep at the wheel in this particular case. Obama called "Superintelligence" by Bostrom one of his favourite books 10 years ago, and with the amount Americans have been publicly fearmongering about Chinese LLMs you can bet it's a common conversation topic in Beijing. Rather I think the apparent lack of action is just because nobody is quite sure what to do with this situation, as it's so hard to forecast. What concretely would you have politicians do? Disclaimer: I know very little about China, but I have studied Chinese history and live in Hong Kong.
> There are reports, I think Microsoft. We'll get into it.
The press release linked to on the word "reports" discusses G42, which as far as I can tell is using Azure cloud compute, and which as far as I can tell is an "AI" consulting company. I could be wrong though - the chair of G42 is famously the UAE's top spy, and I don't know what to make of that. But I worked for an LLM research lab in SF for a while, so I think my BS radar is reasonably well calibrated.
> My primary argument is that if you’re at the point where this thing has vastly superhuman capabilities — it can develop crazy bioweapons targeted to kill everyone but the Han Chinese, it can wipe out entire countries, it can build robo armies and drone swarms with mosquito-sized drones — the US national security state will be intimately involved.
What the actual #$%(&?
I realise these are just hypotheticals, but the fact that CCP ethnic bioweapons are a salient idea indicates to me that Leopold should read a book or two about Chinese history. Of course I can't prove that nobody in Beijing wants this, but it conflicts so sharply with my understanding of the PRC state that I can't help but call BS.
