· economy · 2 min read
Follow up to Situational Awareness?
The superstar hedge fund just got hit hard. Who is going to carry the aggressive AI-powered vision now?
In 2024, a 22-year-old genius named Leopold Aschenbrenner published his thesis about the next 10 years in AI. Up until mid-July he has gotten almost everything right. His hedge fund, Situational Awareness LP, was up over 1,000%. He became now a billionaire (with a net worth of roughly $4 billion) and has made more billions for others (see the latest public 13F filing).
Leopold is an elusive figure. Since 2025 he has gone completely silent. He hasn’t posted on X or on his blog. One rare piece of information that got out is that he got engaged to Avital Balwit, Chief of Staff at Anthropic. Silicon Valley is a small world.
Just as their wedding guests were arriving, the Situational Awareness hedge fund exploded - and not in a good way. Quick summary:
@stepsgrit this 24yo AI genius just got burned bad #LeopoldAschenbrenner #situationalawareness #finance #investing ♬ original sound - howz
I didn’t expect this. I mean I expected an AI cool-down at some point and believed that Situational Awareness is hedged against something like this. I didn’t know he took on this much leverage.
The crash didn’t disprove Leopold’s thesis. It has just shown that the road is rocky and knowing where you’re going is not always enough.
But what’s coming next? Was this just a speed bump? The one certain thing today is that we are at a pivotal moment in history. In 2034, nobody will look back at the past decade and say: “Except for my iPhone 24, not much has changed since 2024.”
In my quest to predict the future, I stumbled across a new thesis from a new fund that reads quite similarly to Situational Awareness. Meet the Sigil Supernova Memo. In contrast to Situational Awareness’s urgent 2024 manifesto — which forecasted aggressive AGI timelines by 2027, an intelligence explosion to superintelligence, and associated national-security/alignment risks — Sigil presents a more pragmatic, post-LLM investment view. It focuses on current physical-world bottlenecks and diversified opportunities across datacenters, robotics, space, biotech, and defense, where capital owners and incumbents win.
Sigil is not new to the fund game - they have two successful crypto funds under their belt.
I wholly recommend reading both theses. And, if you want event more, check out Sigil’s CIO Fiskantes on X and read an interview with him on CzechCrunch.
