The Last Invention: Inside Leopold Aschenbrenner's Intelligence Explosion
AI’s only true limit is your imagination
“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.”
— Irving John Good, Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965)
I.J. Good wrote that in 1965. He was a British mathematician who worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park cracking Nazi codes during World War II. He wasn’t writing science fiction. He was writing a technical paper for Advances in Computers, Volume 6, published by Academic Press.
Sixty years later, Leopold Aschenbrenner — former OpenAI safety researcher, now at one of the most well-capitalized AGI labs in existence — opens Part II of Situational Awareness with that exact quote. Not as a curiosity. As a thesis statement.
His message is clear: we are no longer in the era of speculation.
