Nathan Delisle, University of Chicago

tl;dr: Many critiques of *Situational Awareness* have been purely qualitative; one year later we can finally check the numbers. I did my best to verify his claims using public data through June 2025, and found that his estimates mostly check out.
This is inherently noisy work, so nothing herein is certain. I would encourage red-teaming, particularly in the algo-efficiencies/unhobbling/hardware sections.

Many thanks to Kai Williams, Egg Syntax, and Aaron Scher for their critical feedback.

Abstract

Leopold Aschenbrenner's 2024 essay Situational Awareness forecasts AI progress from 2024 to 2027 in two groups: "drivers" (raw compute, algorithmic efficiency, and post-training capability enhancements known as "un-hobbling") and "indicators" (largest training cluster size, global AI investment, chip production, AI revenue, and electricity consumption).[1] Drivers and the largest cluster size are expected to grow about half an order of magnitude (≈3.2×) annually, infrastructure indicators roughly doubling annually (2× per [...]

The original text contained 78 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 23rd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EGGruXRxGQx6RQt8x/situational-awareness-a-one-year-retrospective

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Mathematical equation showing computing power growth with time variable t

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“Situational Awareness: A One-Year Retrospective” by Nathan Delisle

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Situational Awareness: A One-Year Retrospective” by Nathan Delisle