The Securities and Exchange Commission has reportedly subpoenaed several major Wall Street lenders to glean more information about their role in the near-collapse of AI-focused hedge fund Situational Awareness.
Regulators are seeking insights into Situational Awareness’s trades, use of leverage and communications with the investment banks, which include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup and Bank of America, according to Reuters, citing a source familiar with the matter.
Situational Awareness plunged from about $45 billion to around $10 billion in late July after it was hammered in last month’s tech sell-off.
The hedge fund, led by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner, was forced to unwind much of its publicly listed portfolio of large, concentrated, levered positions — which included SK Hynix and CoreWeave — after losses sparked several margin calls among its prime brokers.
This person looks like an 80’s synthpop star.
Aschenbrenner overleveraged the fund 4:1 and it had no diversity from AI stocks. The problem is their blocks of holdings were so large they could not sell them to meet the margin calls. You can’t just sell $16B in stock unless you dump it cheap.
Looks an awful lot like Citadel’s Ken Griffin set all this up to fail as he bought these stocks at a heavy discount.
Anyone stupid enough to invest in a non diversified hedge fund run by a 24 year old does not deserve to keep their money.
The current data center craze is a bit easier to understand when you realize that the sentiment in this passage from https://situational-awareness.ai/ permeates Silicon Valley thinking these days:
The barriers to even trillions of dollars of datacenter buildout in the US are entirely self-made. Well-intentioned but rigid climate commitments (not just by the government, but green datacenter commitments by Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and so on) stand in the way of the obvious, fast solution. At the very least, even if we won’t do natural gas, a broad deregulatory agenda would unlock the solar/batteries/SMR/geothermal megaprojects. Permitting, utility regulation, FERC regulation of transmission lines, and NEPA environmental review makes things that should take a few years take a decade or more. We don’t have that kind of time.
We’re going to drive the AGI datacenters to the Middle East, under the thumb of brutal, capricious autocrats. I’d prefer clean energy too—but this is simply too important for US national security. We will need a new level of determination to make this happen. The power constraint can, must, and will be solved.
Hard to feel too sorry for his $35B paper loss…
Chat-gpt 9.0, how do we solve the climate crisis we accelerated by training chat-gpt 9.0?