Situational Awareness, a hedge fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has sold the majority of its public stock portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel following steep losses over the past month, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Thursday. It’s a big comedown for the rising star who has been described as both “scarily smart,” and “brash.”
German-born Aschenbrenner, who is 25, had no prior trading experience before launching the fund in 2024. He gained prominence for his investment thesis after publishing essays arguing that scaling AI would require a major build-up in semiconductors, compute, memory, and energy infrastructure.
He joined OpenAI’s “superalignment” team in 2023, two years after graduating as valedictorian from Columbia at 19 (he enrolled at age 15). But he was dismissed from the company a year later over what it described as an improper disclosure of internal information. At the time, that team was led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and AI researcher Jan Leike. Soon after, Sutskever left to start his own company, Leike joined rival Anthropic, and Aschenbrenner launched his fund.
Things couldn’t have been going better for Situational Awareness until very recently. The fund returned 439% for the year through June, Financial Times reported. Assets under management reportedly grew to as much as $45 billion during their peak before the fund’s positions began dropping sharply amid a broader decline in AI infrastructure investments, CNBC reported.
