There’s no bigger hype machine that the business media, who are wont to anoint twenty year olds as the “next Steve Jobs” (Elizabeth Holmes) or the “next Warren Buffett” (Sam Bankman Fried).
Next up is Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI employee turned hedge fund founder of Situational Awareness, who just last week was featured in the Wall Street Journal:
In June, the Wall Street Journal called him the “** 24-year-old AI Wiz**.”
The hedge fund was reportedly on a tear on AI-related investments, expanding in value to $45 billion as reported by CNBC.
But Situational Awareness reportedly faced margin calls from its brokers due to the recent market correction for AI-related companies. That forced Aschenbrenner to sell off all the fund’s stocks in publicly traded companies to Ken Griffin’s Citadel.
Situational Awareness still has a stake in Anthropic, however. CNBC reports that Aschenbrenner is married to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s chief of staff, Avital Balwit.