From a young age, it was clear that Leo Aschenbrenner was a genius. Born in Berlin to a pair of doctors, he graduated from Columbia as valedictorian at the age of 19. After brief stints at FTX and OpenAI, he published a viral essay, Situational Awareness, that took Silicon Valley by storm and launched a hedge fund of the same name. 

As Theo Baker reported in The Atlantic, Aschenbrenner became known as the “Nostradamus of AI,” delivering insight where others only offered confusion. “I can see how AGI will be built,” he wrote and, in just two years, his fund was up more than 1,000%. He seemed a bit cocky and more than a little eccentric, but you couldn’t argue with his results.

That is, until July of this year, when his fund crashed and it turned out the bets he was making were not only highly correlated, but also highly leveraged. After a fairly minor market correction, he was forced to sell his public stocks at fire-sale prices to Ken Griffin. This narrative, of hubris leading to comeuppance, seems to be constantly repeating itself in Silicon Valley.

In Martin Heidegger’s influential essay, The Question Concerning Technology, he describes technology as “a way of revealing,” and gives the example of a hydroelectric dam. A dam doesn’t create the energy in the river, but it reveals that energy and channels it in a particular way—to turn a turbine and generate electricity. 

When a new technology reveals new possibilities, there is initially a lot of confusion about how to channel them.

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