Countdown to Superintelligence: A Conversation with Daniel Kokotaljo (Episode #420)

Sam Harris speaks with Daniel Kokotaljo about the potential impacts of superintelligent AI over the next decade. They discuss Daniel’s predictions in his essay “AI 2027,” the alignment problem, what an intelligence explosion might look like, the capacity of LLMs to intentionally deceive, the economic implications of recent advances in AI, AI safety testing, the potential for governments to regulate AI development, AI coding capabilities, how we’ll recognize the arrival of superintelligent AI, and other topics.

Daniel Kokotajlo is the Executive Director at the AI Futures Project, where he oversees its research and policy recommendations. He previously worked as a governance researcher at OpenAI on scenario planning. In 2021, he predicted the rise of chatbots, chain-of-thought, inference scaling, sweeping AI chip export controls, and $100 million training runs—all more than a year before the launch of ChatGPT. He was profiled in the New York Times and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI.

X: @DKokotajlo