the most important thinker in AI, in my opinion, is this 23 year old. leo aschenbrenner. he has been more right, both in a testable predictive sense and in a market sense than virtually anyone else. and most importantly, he's not an AI doomer, he's not an e/acc, but rather a secret third thing.

in the 165-page essay (really, more of a book) he predicts that we will obtain recursively self-improving AI by 2027, leading to an intelligence implosion & AGI. he thinks AI will become a matter of national security and that the US has no choice but to beat China. he thinks we will have full-fledged agents in 2026. he thinks AI efforts will and should be nationalized. he thinks we will build trillion-dollar datacenters before the decade is out. he thinks AI will use 20%+ of US electricity by 2030. a lot of his analysis is based on simply extrapolating straight lines into the future (compute, FLOPs, model capabilities). the thing is, this has totally held up.

daniel reeves in this post analyzes leo's predictions and finds that even though we are only 1 year in to his "decade-ahead" timeline, his predictions are holding up so far. in the last year, AI CAPEX has dramatically expanded. Stargate is a $500b planned project. halfway there on its own. Leo thought AI CapEx might reach 3% of GDP. hyperscaler CapEx jumped from $239b in 2024 to $368b according to GS and projected at $432b in '26. according to reeves' book review 1 year on, it looks like leo is mostly hitting the mark.

/ resume thread so after writing his manifesto, Leo didn't rest on his laurels. he raised approx $1b for a hedge fund focused on AGI-associated bets in H2 2024. he made bets on chip manufacturers (intel), datacenter-related businesses (broadcom, applied digital), neoclouds (core weave, iris energy, core sci), and utilities (vistra, talen energy, eqt corp) he refused to be shaken out by the "deepseek" moment that terrified a lot of AI investors in early 2025 he printed a 47% return in the first half of the year

notably, he had a huge intel call position in the fund. intel, ordinarily a sleep stock, skyrocketed in september when it emerged that the US government would take a stake in the company. some of his other positions absolutely printed: - IREN: 6x YTD - CRWV: 3.5x YTD - APLD: 4.3x YTD we don't specifically know his returns since we are guessing based on his 13Fs and Intel strike prices, but I would guess his AUM is well over $2b today, and I believe he is up over 100% in 2025 so far. most likely one of the best performing HFs on the planet this year, especially the scale he's operating at.

what I like about Leo is he's doing everything in public. he wrote down his view, and then with no money management expertise, raised a fund, and put capital behind his convictions. compare this with the "AI bubble" callers. how many of them are actually net short AI? how many raised a fund to short AI? I can't name one. writing down your views is one thing, but putting you entire net worth and staking your entire reputation on the trade is another. it was "obvious" at the time that post ChatGPT release in nov 2022 that AI would be a huge theme, but how many people actually acted on this? personally, I have a huge concentrated position in one of the names in his fund, and knowing that Leo was in the trade helped give me the conviction to stay in it, even as the market tried to shake me out (deepseek moment, census data etc). I also picked up IREN and APLD after seeing them in his 13F filings.

sometimes in your career you just have to get one big thing very right and then apply the right amount of leverage to that idea. Leo is one of the best examples of this we've seen in some time. we'll see if he can keep up his blistering pace but either way, it's one of the most interesting stories in money management I've come across in some time and I'll be watching carefully.