THIS WEEK IN AI: Leopold's Fund Collapses, Nvidia Backs Ilya, Slowing Down AI

**Josh** (0:00)
Leopold Aschenbrenner is a 23-year-old kid that raised one of the most successful AI funds ever, but he might be in disastrous trouble right now. News reports this morning states that his fund might be down between 30 to 50% as semiconductor stocks have drawn down aggressively over the last four weeks. We're gonna get into that and a lot more.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
Yeah, let's kick it off with our poster boy, Golden Child, Leopold Aschenbrenner, who has basically done no wrong for the last, what is it, two years of investing, where he's rolled this fund into something like $30 billion. Well, for the first time ever since inception, it seems like things are not doing super hot in paradise. It looks like he's starting to sell, and not just sell, but sell a lot. In fact, liquidate a lot of his positions that he's been accumulating over time because it seems like the fund is in trouble. We know the kind of directive we filmed enough episodes on Leopold to understand his general thesis, which is long only with leverage to try to just maximize upside returns, which has worked incredibly well.
But we understand that, well, I remember vividly in the last episode, as we were comparing him to someone like Gavin Baker, and how Gavin's been around for 30 years because he's able to survive the upswings, the downswings, they have that enduring capability. Leopold is getting his first test of strength right now, and it looks like it's not going super hot. I mean, on screen, I'm looking at a tweet from Martin Screlli that says, situation has sold half of its anthropic stake, which is like, I mean, granted, this is all rumors. None of this is confirmed to be true. But man, if that is, that is a painful, painful loss.

**Josh** (1:33)
To be clear, he invested in their series H round in 2025 when they were worth $60 billion.
So he must be in pretty dire trouble because it made up for like 40 percent of his funds. So we're talking about like three to maybe $6 billion.
And for him to sell that, he must be in drastic trouble. So what are the rumors saying? Again, very reliable source here, Martin Shkreli from the Godel News says that Situational Awareness LP Fund is down more than 50 percent month to date, and it was up 200 percent year to date. So that is a massive drawdown. And in terms of like what positions he's liquidating, I'm a little confused here, Josh, because when we covered his recent 13F, he was hedged. He wasn't particularly bullish and long on everything, but he also wasn't particularly bearish. If you remember, he had one of the largest shorts on Nvidia itself. So I was wondering if he had that portfolio composition back then, he might have even not drawn down too much. Rumors are saying that he's down like 30 percent overall on the fund, which is disastrous for the size of the fund, but it's still not the worst that it could be given that he was long all these semiconductor stocks. Now, the question about whether this is good or bad, I think investors have really been feeling it broadly. A lot of AI stocks in general have just drawn down a lot over the last four weeks. We actually had an episode that covered this. Yesterday, you should definitely go check that episode out. We explained why and what's going on. But I think his thesis still holds true and listen, I hope he makes it out. I hope he's able to come out of this.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:08)
Yeah, dude.
You and me both. I mean, we'll see. The difficult thing about this, again, is it's all speculation because this is all inside of rumors. No one actually knows. We will see. Dude, his next 13F filing is going to be one of the most exciting episodes of all time.
Did Ilya survive or did he not?
Speaking of Ilya, no, did Leopold survive? But speaking of Ilya, we have some news in the Ilya front as well, which comes in the form of his company, Safe Superintelligence. They've been radio silent, and I give this company and the team a tremendous amount of credit because-

**Josh** (3:37)
Josh, who is Ilya?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:38)
Doing this much work.

**Josh** (3:38)
Remind us who Ilya is.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:40)
Ilya Setskever, he is ex-co-founder of OpenAI. He left OpenAI to go start his own company. No one really knows what this company is. They're just named Safe Superintelligence. The idea is that they want to figure out a way to safely align AI with the human intention, and it sounds like they have been making progress. I mean, this company has been radio silent. There's no leaks, there's no information getting out. But they recently, just this week, announced a long-term strategic partnership with Nvidia, which is huge. It says Nvidia is making a substantial investment in SSI that will let us 10x our compute in the next 12 months. We reached the point where our research is worth scaling, and with this partnership, we will be able to. We are honored by Nvidia's conviction. That's crazy.