We Are Experiencing a Situational Awareness Meltdown

Back in 2024, former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner captured everyone’s attention with a 135-page essay/manifesto mapping out the future of artificial intelligence. Then he put his money where his mouth was, starting an investment firm specifically to bet on where he saw the world moving. Now he’s pretty much just got his mouth left. Situational Awareness, Aschenbrenner’s firm with the same name as his essay, was forced to sell off the majority of its public positions after suffering some major losses over the last few weeks, according to a report from CNBC. The reported cause for the sell-off was Aschenbrenner getting it from both sides. According to CNBC, Aschenbrenner had big positions in AI infrastructure companies like SK Hynix, which have been taking a beating in the last month or so. At the same time, his firm was holding on to short positions against software giants like Adobe, betting that they’d see their market squeezed by emerging AI tools. Turns out, nope. Adobe, for example, is up more than 30% in the last month, and the payments were apparently coming due. Seems like the exact kind of spot that someone who was being situationally aware wouldn’t find themselves