Situational Awareness, a hedge fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, has sold the majority of its public stock portfolio to Ken Griffin’s Citadel following steep losses over the past month, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier on Thursday. It’s a big comedown for the rising star who has been described as both “scarily smart,” and “brash.”
German-born Aschenbrenner, who is 25, had no prior trading experience before launching the fund in 2024. He gained prominence for his investment thesis after publishing essays arguing that scaling AI would require a major build-up in semiconductors, compute, memory, and energy infrastructure.
