Opus 5.5 turns an AI hedge fund blowup into a video
After a fund run by a former OpenAI researcher that returned 439% shrank sharply in July, the author had Opus 5.5 turn the blowup into an animated video.
AN EX-OPENAI RESEARCHER TURNED HIS AI ESSAY INTO A $45 BILLION FUND. THEN JULY WIPED OUT 67% OF IT. Leopold Aschenbrenner was fired from OpenAI in 2024 and wrote a long essay called Situational Awareness, predicting human-level AI by 2027. Then he opened a hedge fund with the same name. In the first half of 2026 it made 439%, per the FT. His bet was that whoever sells the shovels for AI wins, so he bought: - SK Hynix, memory chips - CoreWeave and Nebius, data centers for rent - Bloom Energy, power plants for AI servers - a private stake in Anthropic He used up to 4x leverage. For every $1 his investors put in, he borrowed about $3 more from banks and bought $4 of stock. Vig's article below explains why a portfolio like this is really one bet. When the AI trade turns, all of it falls at once. In July it turned. Chipmaker shares lost almost 30% from the June peak. At 4x, a 25% drop wipes out the fund's own money, so Goldman, JPMorgan and Bank of America demanded more collateral. On July 24 Aschenbrenner told investors this was the best moment to buy since early 2025 and asked them to add cash. Six days later he had to sell most of his stocks to Citadel in one deal, at a discount. The fund survived, but it shrank to about $10 billion. He held on to the Anthropic stake, because shares of a private company can't be dumped in a day. I asked Claude Opus 5.5 to show this meltdown as a video. Here is what it made ↓
This post quotes another post: x.com/vig_says/status/2108853227508597228