Leopold Aschenbrenner is a German-American 📝AI 🏷️#researcher turned hedge 🏷️#fund-manager, 🏷️#founder and CIO of Situational Awareness LP, a San Francisco AGI-thesis fund that scaled from roughly $225M in seed capital to ~$5.5B in reported US equity exposure inside its first year. Before launching the fund, he worked on the Superalignment team at 📝OpenAI, and previously did research on long-run economic growth at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute. He graduated as valedictorian from Columbia University at 19 with a dual major in economics and mathematics.
Aschenbrenner was fired from OpenAI in April 2024 over an alleged information leak — a firing he attributes to a security memo he had circulated — one month before the Superalignment team dissolved alongside the departures of 📝Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike. Two months later he published 📝Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, a five-part essay series arguing AGI by 2027, and concurrently launched the fund built around its thesis, anchored by Patrick Collison, John Collison, Nat Friedman, and Daniel Gross. Earlier in his career he spent time at FTX's Future Fund. The fund is co-managed with Carl Shulman as Director of Research, and concentrates positions in AI infrastructure: power generation, data centers, semiconductors, and storage.
Worth tracking less for the trading positions than for the fact that one essay became one of the largest concentrated AGI bets in capital markets. Whatever you think of the 2027 timeline, the man wrote the thesis and then put nearly all his net worth behind it — that's the part to learn from.