AI prodigy Leopold Aschenbrenner’s marriage ceremony weekend introduced collectively a who’s who of Silicon Valley cash and affect for a multi-day celebration.
However there was an enormous elephant in room: simply days earlier than, the 24-year-old’s $45 billion hedge fund, Situational Consciousness, had imploded, struggling losses of greater than $30 billion, and mounting.
Most of the 80 to 100 Silicon Valley heavyweights who turned up for the lavish Carmel-by-the-Sea ceremony had been traders in Aschenbrenner’s fund.
Friends had been invited to networking classes meant to spark conversations about funding concepts and AI tendencies.
However in what can solely be described as peak Bay Space tech tradition, these classes had been quietly reworked from bullish market discussions, to classes about life and philosophy.
Nonetheless, the fund’s collapse didn’t derail the festivities.
The marriage went forward, with attendees sipping Napa Valley wine whereas a DJ spun a Berghain-style set impressed by Aschenbrenner’s German roots, earlier than calling it an evening at simply 11 p.m.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei reportedly didn’t attend.
“It wasn’t like Aschenbrenner went broke and couldn’t pay for the venue or the caterer,” one particular person acquainted with the marriage informed Vainness Honest.
The tech billionaire struck a deal to dump about $3.5 billion price of the fund’s personal stake in Anthropic to a bunch of enterprise capital traders in an effort to keep away from a large margin name, in keeping with The Wall Road Journal.
Then in a last-minute handbrake flip, the deal was scrapped after Ken Griffin’s Citadel agreed to purchase the majority of the fund’s public fairness portfolio, giving the agency one other supply of liquidity.
Aschenbrenner’s rise has been simply as dramatic as his fund’s latest troubles.
The German nationwide graduated as Columbia College’s valedictorian at 19, co-founding an efficient altruism membership.
Aschenbrenner grew to become a darling of the tech world after publishing his 165-page manifesto, Situational Consciousness, in 2024.
He launched a hedge fund with the identical identify, arguing AI fortunes wouldn’t be constructed from chatbots, however from the chips, reminiscence, knowledge facilities, electrical energy, cooling and networking that powered them.
Situational Consciousness raised $100 million in November 2024, with charges surging greater than 1,000% because it attracted a cult-like following, with rivals speeding to repeat his trades, in keeping with The New York Occasions.
However the blockbuster returns got here with blockbuster threat.
The fund used leverage of as much as 4 occasions its capital, CNBC reported.
When AI shares turned south, comparatively modest declines triggered margin calls that threatened to unravel the agency.
He later labored at Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX, the place he met Balwit.
After FTX collapsed and Bankman-Fried was later convicted on fraud and conspiracy prices, Aschenbrenner joined OpenAI whereas Balwit landed at Anthropic as CEO Dario Amodei’s chief of workers.
His OpenAI stint resulted in April 2024 after he was fired for allegedly sharing delicate inner info with Holden Karnofsky, whose spouse works at Anthropic, in keeping with The Wall Road Journal.
Aschenbrenner has stated the doc had already been reviewed for delicate info and that it was “completely regular” to share that sort of info with outdoors researchers for suggestions.
