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How former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner turned a viral AI prophecy into profit, with a $1.5 billion hedge fund and outsize influence from Silicon Valley to D.C. | Fortune

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Of all the unlikely stories to emerge from the current AI frenzy, few are more striking than that of Leopold Aschenbrenner. But Situational Awareness hit differently. Scott Aaronson, a computer science professor at UT Austin who spent two years at OpenAI overlapping with Aschenbrenner, remembered his initial reaction: “Oh man, another one.” But after reading, he told Fortune: “I had the sense that this is actually the document some general or national security person is going to read and say: ‘This requires action.’” In a blog post, he called the essay “one of the most extraordinary documents I’ve ever read,” saying Aschenbrenner “makes a case that, even after ChatGPT and all that followed it, the world still hasn’t come close to ‘pricing in’ what’s about to hit it.” A longtime AI governance expert described the essays as “a big achievement,” but emphasized that the ideas were not new: “He basically took what was already common wisdom inside frontier AI labs and wrote it up in a very n

Of all the unlikely stories to emerge from the current AI frenzy, few are more striking than that of Leopold Aschenbrenner. Recommended Video The 23-year-old’s career didn’t exactly start auspiciously: He spent time at the philanthropy arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange before a controversial year at OpenAI, where he was ultimately fired. Then, just two months after being booted out of the most influential company in AI, he penned an AI manifesto that went viral—President Trump’s daughter Ivanka even praised it on social media—and used it as a launching pad for

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