Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead
TL;DR — The 2024 essay series arguing AGI by 2027 and a national-security race to follow — the most-argued-over AI document of its year.
⬇ Download the archived copy — kept here so the document survives its source going dark. Explicitly free / author-released / CC.
165 pages, self-published June 2024 by a former OpenAI researcher.
The argument runs from straight-line extrapolation of compute and algorithmic efficiency to AGI around 2027, then to superintelligence shortly after, then to the claim that this makes AI development primarily a national-security matter rather than a commercial one — with a projected trillion-dollar cluster and a case for state involvement.
How to weigh it. The extrapolation is explicit and checkable, which is to its credit; the step from capability trend to geopolitical conclusion is where most disagreement lives, and the document argues that step far less rigorously than the first. Worth holding as the clearest statement of a position, not as a forecast to defer to.
Where this came from
165 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.