In the speaker's AI 2040 scenario, people use human-level AI and control from 2030 to 2040 while advancing alignment; by 2040, sufficient alignment progress allows scaling to wildly superhuman AI that relies on alignment rather than control.

“our story in AI 2040 is basically between 2030 and 2040 we're going to we're going to do this buying time we're going to rely on control we're going to have the human level AIs we're going to use those human level AIs to make a bunch of progress on alignment but also on other things and then by 2040 in the story we've made enough alignment progress where it's like hey okay we really don't need to rely on control therefore we can scale to these like sort of wildly superhuman AIs where we're really relying on alignment and if we were to try to control them”

“Both of them would totally fail because if they were misaligned, they would be able to like completely subvert our control measures.”