"AI Prodigy", makes its first move after the crisis

Latest reports show that Leopold Aschenbrenner, known as the "AI prodigy", has returned to the capital market and invested 400 million US dollars in an unlisted company.

People familiar with the matter disclosed that this investment was completed on Tuesday, which is also the latest move by Aschenbrenner to show how he restructures his fund Situational Awareness. Last week, this fund was on the verge of collapse after multiple Wall Street lending institutions issued consecutive margin calls.

The people familiar with the matter added that before this $400 million investment, Situational Awareness had already invested $100 million in the same company last month, but it is still unclear which company in its existing private equity portfolio received the additional investment.

This series of actions brings an end to Aschenbrenner's turbulent week. Previously, due to the rapid devaluation of a series of listed technology stocks it held, the fund fell into turmoil, which triggered continuous demands from multiple banks for additional collateral to guarantee related transactions.

To raise funds to meet margin requirements, Aschenbrenner once considered selling part of his shares in unlisted companies, including Anthropic, Fluidstack and MatX. Eventually, he reached an agreement with Citadel and sold the vast majority of his listed stock portfolio.

This transaction helped him pay off the loan while retaining the most valued unlisted equity assets. As the turmoil gradually subsided, as of last Thursday, the asset size of his newly established fund had plummeted from 45 billion US dollars in early July to about 10 billion US dollars.

Aschenbrenner said in a letter to investors: "We have taken necessary measures to be able to continue to survive. But our fund structure must always be able to withstand losses and continue to move forward after losses. I will take it as my mission to draw necessary lessons from this experience."

Aschenbrenner wrote: "Like you, I am fully invested in it - almost all my assets are in the fund. I will work tirelessly to prove that everything that happened this month will make me a more mature and more resilient investor."

People familiar with the matter revealed that unlike most hedge funds of the same scale, Aschenbrenner's investors are mainly high-net-worth individuals and family offices in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It is reported that among the supporters of this fund are Neil Mehta, founder of Greenoaks, the foundation under Gaurav Kapadia, founder of investment institution XN, and Feroz Dewan, former head of public equity business of Tiger Global Management.

In addition, Dan Sundheim, founder of D1 Capital Partners, is also one of its investors. So far, there is no sign of large-scale investor capital withdrawal.

Previous reports from CLS mentioned that family offices have longer investment cycles and are more willing to ignore the market noise brought by the recent sharp drop in stock prices of enterprises in the artificial intelligence industry chain caused by concerns over capital expenditure.

It is worth mentioning that Aschenbrenner held his wedding in California last Saturday. This wedding can be called the "royal wedding" in the AI circle - his new wife is Avital Balwit, Chief of Staff of the CEO of Anthropic.

After the wedding, Aschenbrenner did not go on his honeymoon immediately. People familiar with the matter said that in order to appease investors' sentiments, he has agreed to have one-on-one phone calls with all investors who intend to communicate this week.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "CLS", author: Zhao Hao, 36Kr is published with authorization.