Situational Grifting
Leopold Aschenbrenner has just been forced into selling off the entire portfolio of his hedge fund. It was apparently worth something in the region of $45 billion, but the issue was that it was entirely concentrated on “AI” infrastructure stocks, so chipmakers, datacentre builders and especially memory manufacturers.
The insane bubble that all the circular trading has created meant the prices and therefore the stocks of those companies had gone through the roof. Aschenbrenner, who is 24 years old, was a visionary genius right?
Maybe not. He has just got completely owned by more experienced market manipulators, but hey, what kind of financial markets expertise do you expect from a 24 year old anyway?
The tech though, the fundamentals, he’s super smart right, which is why he got to run a $45 billion tech-based hedge fund in the first place, right?
A little look at poor Leo’s backstory is quite worthwhile. The son of two doctors, he went to a very nice university and got lots of bits of paper. He also set up a “chapter” at the university for “Effective Altruism”. For those who don’t know, Effective Altruism (EA) is a kind of techno-cult that advertises itself as a philosophical and social movement that advocates impartially calculating benefits and prioritizing causes to provide the greatest good.
Any time you see or hear discussions about the “greatest good”, this is huge red flag jumping up and down waving more red flags.
The utterly corrupt Sam Bankman-Fried of now defunct and bankrupt crypto exchange FTX was a big player in the EA cult, and Leo’s first job just happened to be at FTX.
As is almost always the case, AI bros were/are crypto bros, and Leopold is no exception. He then went to work at OpenAI, who’s board has had high-profile EA members on its roster. Leo was fired from OpnAI, allegedly for leaking information. Surely not.
Leo then allegedly penned an essay titled Situational Awareness which predicted Artificial General Intelligence by 2027, and the main argument for this was the development of “synthetic training data”, and absurd and completely uneducated notion that once they can get AI to generate training data for itself, the exponential rush to AGI would happen.
Off the back of this fuckwittery, lots of supposedly smart, and more importantly wealthy people threw money at Leo the genius and the rest is history. Again. Because this is the same grift Elizabeth Holmes pulled with Theranos. Greed however, has a habit of clouding people’s ability to think. The AI “boom” is the latest and greatest example of that.