Just amazing stuff here, about a young guy whose hedge fund just tanked.
For the past few years, at happy hours and dinner parties in San Francisco, Leopold Aschenbrenner kept confusing people by sharing his favorite outlandish idea.
He wanted to buy galaxies.
...
His idea was that advances in artificial intelligence would soon unlock resources on a cosmic scale, enabling humans to colonize faraway planets. He planned to save money now so he could spend on galaxies, he told them, and make his mark across the universe.
Who do you buy them from? What, exactly, does ownership even give you in this scifi presumably post-scarcity civilization?
Two years ago, he made bold predictions about the impending arrival of superintelligence, writing in a 165-page manifesto called “Situational Awareness” that AI would lead to one of the “most intense and volatile moments of human history.” He quickly turned that interest into money for a hedge fund that eventually managed $45 billion in assets, backed by investors who believed in his prophecy—or his ability to profit from it.
He was barely of drinking age and had no prior investing experience, but his cozy relationships inside the industry fed into his reputation as an oracle of AI—someone who knew more about where the elusive technology was headed than legacy money managers living in New York. He mixed the personal and professional in a city where the two are rarely kept apart.
“There are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness,” he wrote in his viral essay. “Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.”
There are very few people with superpower-tinged genius. It seems I am one of them?
As the big day approached, Aschenbrenner’s friends, former colleagues and fellow members of the Silicon Valley intelligentsia filtered into the wedding hotel. There were more than a dozen Anthropic employees on the guest list, as well as MacAskill and others from the FTX Future Fund, plus effective altruists and the billionaires who had put their money into Situational Awareness.
The wedding was officiated by Ross Douthat, the former New York Times columnist who recently joined “60 Minutes.” He had reached out to Aschenbrenner after reading his manifesto, and they met last year when his family was on a California road trip. Aschenbrenner and Balwit hosted them for dinner, Douthat said, soliciting marriage advice from him and his wife and shocking their children with predictions about AI.
Ah the EA/longtermist con artist freaks of course.