This Nostradamus is not as bad as the "hmong Nostradamus" on PH

[theking]

...but he still bad as he failed...

How the ‘Nostradamus of AI’ failed to spot a market crash
Just a month ago, Leopold Aschenbrenner was being hailed as a boy wonder.

At the end of June, the 24-year-old's $20bn (£15bn) hedge fund had made a 439pc profit in just six months, thanks to bets on a string of AI companies such as Anthropic, SK Hynix and Nebius.

Tim Ferris, the investor and podcast host, called him "the Nostradamus of AI".

"The number of actual hits, predictive hits that Leopold had is staggering," Ferris said in March. "It is just really about as close to clairvoyant as you could possibly be."

But this week, a jolt in global stock markets meant it came crashing down.

Under pressure from lenders, Aschenbrenner's highly leveraged fund, Situational Awareness, was forced into a fire sale of most of its assets on Thursday.

The company sold its public shareholdings to Citadel, the East Coast investment giant run by US billionaire Ken Griffin, shrinking the fund to a fraction of its earlier size.

While the fund limps on, it was a shocking fall from grace for the so-called wunderkind, who had bet on his ability to see things that the rest of the investment world could not.

Aschenbrenner, born in Germany to two doctors, has always seemed to be in a hurry. He entered New York's Columbia University at just 15 and when graduating aged 19, he said: "I wish I could have started even earlier."

His studies included a stint at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, set up by Nick Bostrom, the AI philosopher, and whose funders included Elon Musk.

The institute was closely linked with the university's Centre for Effective Altruism (EA), the institutional birthplace of the effective altruism (EA) movement devoted to addressing existential risks such as out-of-control AI.

Will MacAskill, the Scottish philosopher and EA's leading light, later said he convinced Aschenbrenner not to go to law school, instead bringing him into the fold at the FTX Future Fund, the philanthropic endeavour financed by Sam Bankman-Fried's cryptocurrency venture.

FTX collapsed at the end of 2022, with Bankman-Fried eventually sentenced to 25 years in prison, and its fund as collateral damage.

Aschenbrenner landed on his feet, joining ChatGPT maker OpenAI in 2023. However, the company sacked him a year later, apparently for leaking internal information – a claim Aschenbrenner denies.

However, the dismissal proved to be his making. The 24-year-old published a 165-page online essay in June 2024, titled Situational Awareness.

The essay's first line summed up the thesis. "You can see the future first in San Francisco."