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Leopold Aschenbrenner, the founder of the ill-fated hedge fund Situational Awareness, held a belief in AI so outrageous that it’s literally galaxy-brained.
According to a new scoop from The Wall Street Journal, the 24-year-old former OpenAI employee wanted to buy entire cosmic realms after he got rich off of AI — as in, yes, galaxies of stars and planets like our Milky Way, or the neighboring Andromeda.
This is something that he’s reportedly been telling people, completely unprompted, at San Francisco dinner parties for years. The way Aschenbrener explained it, advances in AI would soon enable humanity to unlock unlimited resources and colonize distant planets. After that, conquering parts of the universe would be a triviality.
This was a serious and imminent enough possibility, in his mind, that Aschenbrenner said he planned to save money so he could buy galaxies in the future. He even apparently promised to buy a galaxy for his wife, Anthropic chief of staff Avital Balwit. Love conquers all.
The chances of Aschenbrenner being one of the wealthy elites who could afford to buy a galaxy, however, are now looking as remote as the possibility that humankind could ever conquer one within his lifetime.
Situational Awareness, the AI hedge fund he founded, nearly imploded last month after losing over two-thirds of its value. Its disastrous, all-in bets on AI backfired during a mass tech sell-off, wiping out billions of dollars in a collapse so catastrophic that it launched an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Aschenbrenner had no experience managing money prior to launching Situational Awareness, but that didn’t stop people from hailing him as a “Nostradamus of AI.” His predictions mostly involved preaching to the AI evangelist choir, and his fervor for the tech evidently led him to throw caution to the winds of Wall Street.
His fund used borrowed money, called leverage, to buy shares in AI companies — a risky maneuver. Using leverage can boost returns when those assets go up, but expose it to even greater losses when they hit a downturn. He also poured money into shorting software companies, which investors once thought would be outmoded by AI tools. Those software companies like Adobe, though, continued to climb, while his glorious tech socks fell off a cliff.
To save it from a complete implosion, Aschenbrenner was forced to sell the majority of the fund’s assets to the investment firm Citadel, in what was “one of the largest and most sudden stock transactions in Wall Street history,” the Financial Times reported.
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