If you’re not familiar with the name Leopold Aschenbrenner, you should be. A 24-year-old wunderkind, Aschenbrenner was hired by OpenAI in 2023 to work on the company’s “superalignment” team, essentially trying to figure out how to keep AI systems safe once they become smarter than the people building them. After being let go in 2024, he published a 165-page essay called Situational Awareness that went viral in Silicon Valley, Washington and on Wall Street.
His central argument in a nutshell: AI models could become capable of doing the work of AI researchers by around 2027. If that happens, AI begins improving itself, and the timeline to artificial general intelligence (AGI) compresses dramatically.
Aschenbrenner also created a hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP, specifically to invest in the AGI growth trend. It holds a respectable $13.7 billion in assets. That’s up from only $254 million at the end of 2024, a head-spinning 54x increase.
The bigger s
