The World’s Best AI Investor is 23 Years Old (Here's What He Owns)

23-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner transformed $1 billion into $4 billion in less than a year, driven by his predictive essay on AI trends. We highlight his unique investment strategy, including a key bet on Intel and stakes in AI compute firms like CoreWeave. Join us for insights on whether his success is due to luck or strategic insight, offering valuable lessons for aspiring investors!

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TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Leopold Aschenbrenner
2:43 From Researcher to Fund Manager
3:19 The Billion-Dollar Fundraising
5:12 The Intel Trade
6:08 Portfolio
6:37 Investing in NeoClouds
8:59 Core Scientific: A Risky Bet
12:55 CoreWeave and Strategic Moves
14:21 Analysis
20:45 The Risk of Timing
24:11 Conclusion

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RESOURCES

Josh: https://x.com/JoshjKale

Ejaaz: https://x.com/cryptopunk7213

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Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here:
https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Creators and Guests

Host

Ejaaz Ahamadeen

Host

Josh Kale

What is Limitless Podcast?

Exploring the frontiers of Technology and AI

Ejaaz:
So you've heard of Warren Buffett, you've heard of Ray Dalio,

Ejaaz:
but I bet you haven't heard of Leopold Aschenbrenner,

Ejaaz:
a 23-year-old ex-open AI researcher who raised $1 billion and turned it into

Ejaaz:
$4 billion in under a year.

Ejaaz:
His secret? A 165-page essay which predicted the future of AI over the next decade.

Ejaaz:
And he got a lot of these predictions correct so far.

Ejaaz:
He predicted spending trillions of dollars on the AI capex

Ejaaz:
bubble open airs checked that one off he predicted GPUs becoming

Ejaaz:
as scarce as gold which is pretty much what we're saying he predicted constraints

Ejaaz:
on the energy grid which is exactly what we're saying today but he put his money

Ejaaz:
where his mouth is he made some pretty crazy trades one of the most famous ones

Ejaaz:
being buying intel before the US government took a 10% stake in it and the recent

Ejaaz:
13F filings of his fund just got released last week.

Ejaaz:
And it reveals his latest newest trade, which might make him billions more.

Ejaaz:
Josh, have you heard of this Leopold guy?

Josh:
This Leopold guy is unbelievably impressive. It's like very few times that you

Josh:
come across someone and you see something that's like, oh my gosh,

Josh:
this guy's amazing. And then you see it over and over and over again.

Josh:
And I kind of want to tell the story that I read earlier this morning when I

Josh:
was preparing for this, which starts in 2023.

Josh:
Because Leopold, he was fresh out of Columbia University. He shows up at OpenAI

Josh:
in 2023, and he's a weird young guy on the super alignment team.

Josh:
Now, you might know some other names on the super alignment team.

Josh:
One of the most noteworthy ones is Ilias Zetskever, one of the largest names

Josh:
now in crypto, who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI.

Josh:
They had a falling out. And basically what happens with Leopold is in 2023,

Josh:
there's a problem at OpenAI.

Josh:
And Leopold writes a security memo that he shares with the OpenAI board saying,

Josh:
hey, we're building this really unbelievably important technology that should

Josh:
be private because we are at a high risk of espionage from China. And

Josh:
That wasn't received very well from the OpenAI Board of Directors because less

Josh:
than one year later, he was fired from the company.

Josh:
What did he do? He left, he went to the drawing board and wrote out a 165-page

Josh:
paper called Situational Awareness, The Decade Ahead.

Josh:
And within that, he wrote about AGI in 2027, he wrote about the path from AGI

Josh:
to super intelligence, and he wrote about the trillion-dollar compute cluster

Josh:
and the power scramble that's going to happen in pursuit of that.

Josh:
Now, this memo went absolutely bonkers on the internet.

Josh:
Everybody read it. Every top CEO in the world of AI and technology,

Josh:
they all read it and they all said, who is this guy? I want to invest some money in him.

Josh:
So Leopold goes and raises $1 billion to start an AI fund.

Josh:
And that's where I'm going to pass it off to you, E.J.S., because that's where

Josh:
the really fun story begins is he went from super alignment to fund manager

Josh:
in the matter of, what, less than

Josh:
two years. and now this fund is blowing everybody else out of the water.

Josh:
So the cool thing for me is that he predicted AGI in 2027, but not only that,

Josh:
he told you exactly how to invest in AI in order to receive the upside that

Josh:
his fund is getting. So that's kind of what we're going to go through now in this episode.

Ejaaz:
Yeah, it's so impressive that he's probably lived multiple people's dreams before

Ejaaz:
he's even hit the age of 25, which is just that you can say for most people.

Ejaaz:
The other thing is he, I must emphasize this, he's had zero experience trading

Ejaaz:
before he raised this fund.

Ejaaz:
He just casually raised a billion dollars, which just kind of shows how convincing

Ejaaz:
his thesis, situational awareness was.

Ejaaz:
So I kind of want to dig into like him raising a billion dollars,

Ejaaz:
Josh, and then what made him like one of the most successful traders of this

Ejaaz:
time. And then we're going to dig into like his latest trade.

Ejaaz:
And I know we're excited about that. so after he raised

Ejaaz:
a billion dollars people were kind of like well what's he going to do like he's

Ejaaz:
kind of predicting but so fast forward sorry

Ejaaz:
rewind about nine months ago

Ejaaz:
um he was claiming that like ai capex was going to reach trillions of dollars

Ejaaz:
and therefore a lot of these compute generating companies these are gpu companies

Ejaaz:
like nvidia but also chip companies or competitors like intel and also things

Ejaaz:
called neoclouds which are kind of like ai compute service providers think AWS,

Ejaaz:
but they hyper-specialize in AI compute called NeoClouds.

Ejaaz:
He was investing in a lot of these companies, which people were like,

Ejaaz:
this is kind of crazy, dude. CapEx is never going to get to this much.

Ejaaz:
You're crazy. You're just a kid. You don't know what you're talking about.

Ejaaz:
Fast forward three months from then, Josh, and we're already talking about hundreds

Ejaaz:
of billions of dollars raised.

Ejaaz:
We're talking about Microsoft, Meta, Google investing hundreds of billions of

Ejaaz:
dollars, Elon investing hundreds of billions of dollars in their own data centers.

Ejaaz:
And now, of course, we're still going to call you on a previous episode,

Ejaaz:
them benefiting so much from signing deals with the Microsofts and the open AIs of the world.

Ejaaz:
And that brings me to the first trade that he absolutely nailed,

Ejaaz:
which was investing in Intel.

Ejaaz:
So originally, his fund took a massive position in Intel.

Ejaaz:
And back then, Intel was kind of considered as the dying competitor to NVIDIA.

Ejaaz:
And they kind of needed saving. They needed some kind of a life-saving ramp for them.

Ejaaz:
And that came in the form, Josh, of the US government, which decided to take

Ejaaz:
a 10% stake in Intel and sent their shares skyrocketing.

Ejaaz:
But most importantly, it sent Leopold's funds

Ejaaz:
call options into the money massively such that it brought it up 50%.

Ejaaz:
So it went from a $1 billion fund to a $1.5 billion fund in under three months. Just insane.

Josh:
AGI is coming in 2027. So how do you take that thesis of AGI coming in 2027

Josh:
and then turn it into investable positions?

Josh:
He's not really a stock picker who later discovered AI.

Josh:
He's kind of like an AGI timeline guy who asked like, okay, well,

Josh:
if my view is right, where are the forced winners and the forced losers?

Josh:
Whereas typical investors, they're kind of like, well, what's cheap?

Josh:
They're looking at PE ratios.

Josh:
Leopold's like, well, what's mispriced because the world itself is about to

Josh:
change categorically and the rest of the world does not agree with me.

Josh:
And that arbitrage is where we're really seeing these big improvements in his

Josh:
portfolio performance.

Josh:
And you could kind of map it directly

Josh:
to his portfolio. He had like a few bottlenecks. One of them was power.

Josh:
One was compute hardware. And one was like secure, well-governed labs,

Josh:
OpenAI being not one of them, which is part of the reason why he problem with them.

Josh:
And power kind of maps to bets like utilities, generators, Bitcoin miners, things like that.

Josh:
And then we have compute hardware, which maps to chip makers,

Josh:
experiment makers and like upstream materials type stuff for batteries and hardware like that.

Josh:
And then we have the secure, well-governed labs, which kind of translates to

Josh:
the elite AI labs like Anthropic and Google.

Josh:
And you kind of see this laid out through the portfolio. So could we get into

Josh:
the portfolio and kind of talk about more of these positions?

Josh:
We had Intel, which was a huge success, but he has like every single position

Josh:
is a success. So what else is there in the portfolio that we should talk about?

Ejaaz:
He has these positions in these things called neoclouds. So

Ejaaz:
you see two tickers on the tweet that i'm showing right now uh one

Ejaaz:
is call iron which is up 6x year to

Ejaaz:
date um this was like back in october 11th right so

Ejaaz:
not too long ago then you have call weave that was up three and

Ejaaz:
a half x year to date um now the best way to

Ejaaz:
think about these two companies josh is that um they

Ejaaz:
are like i said earlier aws but supercharged and specialized towards uh ai compute

Ejaaz:
so a company that would engage services with these types of companies would

Ejaaz:
be a microsoft or a google or a Meta or an OpenAI who want to ramp up compute

Ejaaz:
to train their frontier models,

Ejaaz:
but maybe don't want to invest all the money themselves in setting up the data

Ejaaz:
centers and running it themselves, hiring the technicians, doing all the wiring.

Ejaaz:
They would rather just kind of pay a provider to do it all for them.

Ejaaz:
That is iron. That is CoreWeave. And that's what their main kind of like unique offering is.

Ejaaz:
And so he was like, he made the simple bet, which was simply like,

Ejaaz:
okay, well, demand for compute and GPUs isn't going to die anytime soon.

Ejaaz:
In fact, it's going to probably escalate pretty drastically.

Ejaaz:
And they're not going to want to do it all themselves and take on all that risk.

Ejaaz:
So they're going to invest in hyper-specialized providers.

Ejaaz:
Now, back then, Josh, when he made this bet, that was seen as an insane thing to do.

Ejaaz:
Today, when CoreWeave recently just signed a $19 billion partnership with Microsoft

Ejaaz:
and they did the same thing with OpenAI.

Ejaaz:
By the way, all those companies I mentioned have actually gone ahead and done this.

Ejaaz:
They've committed hundreds of billions of dollars over the next couple of years

Ejaaz:
with these neoclouds. It seems like the most obvious bet ever.

Ejaaz:
The other thing that I think about, Josh, when I'm looking at this portfolio

Ejaaz:
is, has he made, in your opinion, a pretty drastic bet here?

Ejaaz:
Like he's betting on the raw materials. He's betting on the supply chain,

Ejaaz:
which is probably the obvious thing if you think that AI is going to be the

Ejaaz:
most demanding and transformational technology going forwards. Am I crazy?

Josh:
No, I don't think you are. I think he was early and he saw it with clarity and he went all in.

Josh:
And those are three very difficult things for the average person to do.

Josh:
We've been sitting here telegraphing the future every single week on the show.

Josh:
And still, we kind of lacked the foresight to actually go all in ourselves. Yeah.

Josh:
A really interesting example is this company, Core Scientific,

Josh:
because it's known as a risky Bitcoin mining company.

Josh:
And this is kind of a testament to how he thinks, because from Leopold vantage

Josh:
point, he doesn't see a risky Bitcoin mining company.

Josh:
He sees that they run massive power-hungry data centers, that they have power

Josh:
contracts, land contracts, interconnections between all of the two.

Josh:
And if AI soaks up all the demand and spare power, well, miners who are doing

Josh:
Bitcoin can pivot to become weirdly valuable in this world of AI.

Josh:
So he's just kind of seeing this holistically he's like okay we need energy

Josh:
we need infrastructure where does that exist where is it improperly applied

Josh:
to and then how can i how can i profit off of that and so far is he down on

Josh:
any position i think every one of these is up significantly.

Ejaaz:
This is not one billion to four billion over four billion 4.1

Josh:
Billion okay can we talk about that number two because that implies he has multiplied

Josh:
his money by over 3x we talked about the intel one where word on the street

Josh:
he's made a billion dollars in a single day from the intel trade which.

Ejaaz:
Is which is what he did man

Josh:
What else is here?

Ejaaz:
Okay, so I mean, to put that into context, Josh, that makes him the number one

Ejaaz:
hedge fund trader in the world right now.

Ejaaz:
Because it's not like he's trading with a couple of million dollars either.

Ejaaz:
Not even tens or hundreds of millions. It is the brilliant market cap.

Josh:
And this is a 23-year-old on his first try ever doing this.

Ejaaz:
First try ever trading. It's freaking insane.

Ejaaz:
And he's doing this off an essay, which is like even the best part.

Ejaaz:
Like he had this envisioned out.

Ejaaz:
Josh, you just mentioned a company that he's invested in called Core Scientific.

Ejaaz:
I have a crazy tale to tell you about this company. Are you guys ready?

Josh:
Okay, give me some lore.

Ejaaz:
Okay, this is crazy lore over here. Okay, so last week we had an episode where

Ejaaz:
we basically talk about Michael Berry.

Ejaaz:
He's the guy from the Big Short that basically shorted the entire real estate

Ejaaz:
market. 2008 made a heck ton of money.

Ejaaz:
And he came back last week and he was like, I'm shorting companies like CoreWeave

Ejaaz:
because I don't believe there's enough GPU demand and the company's stock prices

Ejaaz:
are way inflated. Turns out he was massively wrong and the day after he made

Ejaaz:
that tweet, his fund shut down, Josh.

Ejaaz:
He had some kind of sensibility around his thesis, right?

Ejaaz:
Because that week, CoreWeave's stock price dropped about 10%.

Ejaaz:
Even though it was up 5.5x this year, it was down 10%. So he was like,

Ejaaz:
this is the bubble popping, right?

Ejaaz:
And if you looked into CoreWeave's earnings reports, which was also released that week,

Ejaaz:
it was revealed that the reason why the stock dumped was because they had a

Ejaaz:
third-party provider that they depended on to deliver the compute that they

Ejaaz:
were trying to scale up, Josh.

Ejaaz:
So I think the numbers were, they promised 250 megawatts of power,

Ejaaz:
but they could only end up delivering 150 megawatts for the rest of the year

Ejaaz:
because this third-party service provider wasn't able to kind of convert its

Ejaaz:
infrastructure into AI GPU supply.

Ejaaz:
Guess the name of that company, of that third-party service provider.

Josh:
Oh, it's not corn scientific, is it? Oh, you bet.

Ejaaz:
You bet. So now let me bring your attention to this tweet that we have up on here, Josh,

Ejaaz:
because it revealed on Friday, last week, Situational Awareness Fund,

Ejaaz:
which is Leopold's Fund's recent 13F findings, which reveals the positions that

Ejaaz:
he's taken, a brand new trade. Josh.

Ejaaz:
He is long, $563 million worth of CoreWeave stock.

Ejaaz:
And if you notice just underneath that, almost $400 billion in a company called Core Scientific.

Ejaaz:
So this is basically a massive, almost $1 billion bet on CoreWeave to be the

Ejaaz:
leading neocloud provider.

Ejaaz:
He's giving us all the signs and signals that this is the company,

Ejaaz:
all the two companies to back.

Josh:
This is fascinating too, because I recently, I was watching the show Billions,

Josh:
where it's about this guy, this big hedge fund guy, and he runs a private fund

Josh:
and he sometimes does hostile takeovers of company in order to get his way with things.

Josh:
And that very much feels like that's what Leopold is doing. I think he owned

Josh:
6.8% and now it's up to 9% of the company, which means that he likely gets some

Josh:
sort of seat at the board or some sort of say in what happens.

Josh:
And he could actually control the destiny of these companies that were previously

Josh:
for Bitcoin mining rigs, moving them over to the AI world and working together

Josh:
with CoreWeave. And it's this self-fulfilling prophecy.

Josh:
And it's funny because you cannot possibly be more in.

Josh:
He is hedging with the risk that is going to merge together into even more risk.

Josh:
But he has a hands-on perspective

Josh:
view on how he's doing this now he's operating this so it implies that there's

Josh:
more people on the team that are helping with this this is a lot of very difficult

Josh:
complicated things to do but it's all seemingly going according to plan thus far.

Ejaaz:
Yeah i mean he like i said he's probably like the

Ejaaz:
world's best trader right now at this at this point he's just hitting win after

Ejaaz:
win which just doesn't happen especially with capital that he's trading at this

Ejaaz:
size um the way i kind of think about this josh is he's gone levered long core

Ejaaz:
weave because he's bought the riskiest asset that is either on or technically

Ejaaz:
off CoreWeave's balance sheet,

Ejaaz:
which is this provider, which is letting them down right now.

Ejaaz:
So I'm guessing if he owns, what did you say, a 9% stake in Core Scientific?

Josh:
Correct.

Ejaaz:
Right. He probably has a board seat on that company, right?

Ejaaz:
So he's probably advising them in their ear, day in, day out,

Ejaaz:
how to construct their GPU supply such that

Ejaaz:
you know, they can meet the goals that CoreWeave has set for them.

Ejaaz:
So that CoreWeave's stock earnings next quarter is up only, stock pumps,

Ejaaz:
and all their partnerships with OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Microsoft,

Ejaaz:
let's play the violin, does extremely well, right?

Ejaaz:
Because like he, like, it gets the kind of like domino effect of stock appreciation

Ejaaz:
for all these partnerships that they've already signed.

Ejaaz:
So this is incredibly risky thing.

Ejaaz:
Will it pay off? I don't know. But So far, his track record kind of presumes,

Josh:
Hey, well, so far, it is definitely paying off.

Josh:
And that leaves me with two questions that I want to get to to kind of conclude

Josh:
the second part of the show, which is one, how do we participate?

Josh:
What does this portfolio look like? Where are the opportunities for us still available?

Josh:
And two, is he just having the best luckiest year of his life,

Josh:
or is this actually a durable strategy?

Josh:
So maybe we start with the first one, which is portfolio breakdown and how we

Josh:
want to think about how we can not necessarily emulate this,

Josh:
not investment advice but think about how he considers his bets and see which

Josh:
ones we think that are worth placing ourselves okay i'm getting fomo that's

Josh:
okay like three x return in one year is crazy i want in on.

Ejaaz:
This i am also getting fomo um so i josh like not financial advice but i'm showing

Ejaaz:
you a tweet which literally has the tickers carved out for the entire let me

Ejaaz:
screenshot hold on yeah please screenshot it okay and for those of you listening

Ejaaz:
you know up to you whether you want to do that as well

Ejaaz:
What's good about this is he's ranked these tickers on this tweet in terms of

Ejaaz:
how sized he is in this position.

Ejaaz:
So the ticker that isn't in here, that is still his biggest size, is Intel.

Ejaaz:
He's got a huge call position on there. And that's his Bitcoin.

Ejaaz:
That's his steady state investment, right?

Ejaaz:
And then he has CoreWeave, which is now his new second largest position at almost $600 million.

Ejaaz:
Then he has Core Scientific at, I think it was around $360 million.

Ejaaz:
And then as you go down this kind of list, IRON, CIFR, Hutt,

Ejaaz:
Riot, these are all much smaller positions, but much riskier bets.

Ejaaz:
He doesn't know for sure if they are going to play out. That's kind of the way that I'm looking at it.

Ejaaz:
And then, do you have any, sorry, do you have anything to say?

Ejaaz:
No, no, no, please keep going.

Ejaaz:
And then to answer your second question, Josh, you know, will this thing kind of play out?

Ejaaz:
Well, let me introduce you to this tweet, which talks about the top five most

Ejaaz:
contracted AI compute capacity in development.

Josh:
Those stickers look familiar.

Ejaaz:
Yeah. Do those stickers look familiar to you, Josh? Oh, look,

Ejaaz:
there's Iron that is committed to 2.9 gigawatts of power.

Ejaaz:
There's CoreWeave at 2.9 gigawatts of power.

Ejaaz:
And there's CIFR at 2.6 gigawatts of power.

Ejaaz:
And Enbys, which the fund did have a position. I don't know whether it still

Ejaaz:
has a position in. The point being, that is what?

Ejaaz:
Three, six, let's call it nine gigawatts of power, Josh. That translates into

Ejaaz:
hundreds of billions of dollars.

Ejaaz:
Who's spending all this money? It's cashflow positive mag seven companies, baby.

Ejaaz:
It is Meta. It is Google who all have like crazy balance sheets that can afford this spend.

Ejaaz:
So it's not like it's even in a bubble where it's a levered bet for those kinds of companies.

Ejaaz:
This is just like agreements that they've made and signed that are inevitably

Ejaaz:
going to be fulfilled. Crazy.

Josh:
This is what we talk about with that, that layer stack where there's like the

Josh:
core infrastructure, then chips, then there's energy, and then there's the app

Josh:
layer, and then there's the like APIs.

Josh:
It's like he's, I guess you could think of this as like, we have the conglomerates,

Josh:
we have Google, we have Meta, we have those big ones that you described.

Josh:
They're bringing in tons of cash. They just have very durable businesses that

Josh:
are super cashflow positive, make tons of profit.

Josh:
They're sending their profits to the companies that can do the hard work for them,

Josh:
that could build the infrastructure, that could create these AI labs that they just

Josh:
don't want to do one noteworthy one actually as i'm describing this is oracle

Josh:
because i believe oracle is partnered with open ai to build a lot of their ai

Josh:
infrastructure the biggest um so do you have any idea why something like that

Josh:
would be missing because that seemingly feels obvious to add to this position

Josh:
or maybe it's just too big to fit into this category because it seems like he has,

Josh:
megabets and then some minibets and oracle could perhaps be a weird middleman

Josh:
that doesn't quite fit the mold?

Ejaaz:
Honestly, it's a good question. So my head immediately goes to two things.

Ejaaz:
One, I think it's more of a middleman play than the safe bet that he's already

Ejaaz:
kind of taken with conviction, which was Intel.

Ejaaz:
And that was probably a much better bet that he would take over and over again

Ejaaz:
because he invested pre the government taking 10%, right?

Ejaaz:
That government state kind of gives it any kind of investor safety that like,

Ejaaz:
oh, the government's got it.

Ejaaz:
It's not a bailout per se, but it's more of like a, I think this stock probably

Ejaaz:
isn't going down and they're going to sign a bunch of future partnerships, right?

Ejaaz:
Like with the government's help, Intel signed a massive partnership.

Ejaaz:
I think it was like $100 billion worth of GPUs with NVIDIA and like all these

Ejaaz:
kind of like alliances, which you wouldn't expect.

Ejaaz:
So I think he's kind of fine with the Oracle side of things.

Ejaaz:
What's interesting to me, Josh, and I'm curious what your take is,

Ejaaz:
because you and I have gone back and forth on this.

Ejaaz:
Listen, you and I both know GPUs are super essential, right?

Ejaaz:
But we talked about Satya Nadella from Microsoft last week, basically saying that...

Ejaaz:
A lot of his GPUs that he's already bought, hundreds of millions of dollars

Ejaaz:
worth, are collecting dust. What was the reason? Didn't have any energy.

Ejaaz:
Didn't have any grid supply for that. I don't see any tickers necessarily that

Ejaaz:
are directly on the energy supply train here.

Ejaaz:
He's gone kind of like for the AI compute provider, which they kind of have

Ejaaz:
involvement in setting up the data compute and the grid supply,

Ejaaz:
but like nothing directly there.

Ejaaz:
Like, is that something that he's missing? Is that something that you and I

Ejaaz:
maybe have alpha on? I don't know.

Josh:
Maybe, but I wonder if it really exists Because when I think of these companies,

Josh:
I'm not sure how many are actually in the business of generating power energy.

Josh:
Like when I think of that, I know Siemens is a company. It's a,

Josh:
it's a European company, actually. It's not even traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Josh:
They specialize in making these gas turbines that a lot of, not gas turbines

Josh:
that a lot of these power centers are using, but their backlog is for like years and years of time.

Josh:
So I wonder if there's just genuinely a shortage of large companies that are

Josh:
doing it. and it's more of a distributed effort in terms of who is actually

Josh:
able to get power to these data centers.

Josh:
So that could be why, that's my best guess. I'm not totally sure.

Ejaaz:
I mean, he knows who the biggest consumers are going to be, regardless of who

Ejaaz:
builds the energy, right?

Ejaaz:
So maybe the way he's thinking about it is it's too risky, to your point,

Ejaaz:
Josh, to bet on who the energy suppliers are going to be.

Ejaaz:
Let them figure that out. But I know once they have ramped up their energy,

Ejaaz:
and boy, will they, because the demand is overflowing at this point,

Ejaaz:
it's going to flow directly into these companies, these neoclouds,

Ejaaz:
because that's who all the tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollar

Ejaaz:
partnerships are being signed by the hyperscalers.

Josh:
But what a great masterclass in conviction. And like really having the foresight

Josh:
to see where the puck is going, going all in and creating this essay,

Josh:
getting a billion dollars fundraise, deploying it, and then actually hitting.

Josh:
Now, that leaves me with, I guess, this final point that I want to ask you,

Josh:
Ejaz, because he's not really betting on AI. Well, he is, but he's not betting entirely on AI.

Josh:
He's betting that his timing of AI, which is this 2027-ish AGI, is right.

Josh:
And if that's off by a couple years, by a decade, you very quickly go from genius to cautionary tale.

Josh:
And so far it's working, and so far there have been no gluts,

Josh:
But with everybody screaming bubble, with everyone screaming,

Josh:
you know, there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. The prices of lots of stocks are going down.

Josh:
Is this a stroke of luck or is there real genius? I suspect it exists somewhere

Josh:
in between. But I'm curious what you think about that.

Ejaaz:
Leopold is the smartest investor in AI. I think you and I probably might agree

Ejaaz:
with that right now. Turning one bill to four bill is pretty nuts.

Ejaaz:
The smartest man in AI could theoretically be Sam Altman.

Ejaaz:
And sam altman recently released his

Ejaaz:
roadmap for open ai do you remember when he

Ejaaz:
said he would achieve agi like a core

Ejaaz:
research scientist so ai is curing cancer yes it was 27 i believe no was it

Ejaaz:
oh wait oh wait maybe i don't know no no okay what's a decade no no so so okay

Ejaaz:
so i i might be cheating a little bit here but he said that we would re we would reach um

Ejaaz:
expert research, scientific grade AI by the end of 2027. He said,

Ejaaz:
we're going to get the AI research intern by the end of next year, 2026.

Ejaaz:
So technically, if we had an AI that was producing, you know,

Ejaaz:
potential cures for cancer or cures for like things that kind of like cured

Ejaaz:
trillions of dollars worth of ailments or whatever that might be,

Ejaaz:
I would say that's somewhat on the verge of AI.

Ejaaz:
And I can imagine a model that powerful, what could it be from the consumer

Ejaaz:
side? That would be chat GPT 5.1 on steroids.

Ejaaz:
So if I had to guess, with all the bets that have paid off so far with Leopold,

Ejaaz:
and I'm guessing he's updating his thinking over and over again.

Ejaaz:
He's seeing kind of decades in advance at this point.

Ejaaz:
He might be right. I don't know whether, like, he might be right. What do you think?

Josh:
You think I'm crazy? I think it probably doesn't matter to an extent.

Josh:
Because the gains will be so large in the meantime. Like, he's collected that

Josh:
zero to one on all these companies.

Josh:
Like, he bought a Bitcoin mining company that nobody cared about.

Josh:
And now it is going to be an AGI mining company.

Josh:
And that like delta between the like, nobody cares about this to,

Josh:
oh my gosh, this is so valuable is very high.

Josh:
And just collecting that alone means that the timing probably means a little bit less.

Josh:
And I guess the takeaway for myself and everyone listening is that you don't

Josh:
really have to agree with his AGI timeline exactly, but there's something to

Josh:
learn from the way that he starts with a worldview and then looks for these

Josh:
choke points and then asks,

Josh:
where's the market still pricing the old world instead of the new one?

Josh:
And I think that's kind of how I'm going to leave this episode with is,

Josh:
is where is the world not seeing a future that I believe?

Josh:
Like, where is there misalignment? And where is there an advantage there?

Josh:
And Leopold with this fund has clearly shown that there is a huge arbitrage

Josh:
opportunity for those with the eye and the will to actually seek these out and pursue them.

Ejaaz:
Really well said. I want to end with this term that Nick Carter used to describe

Ejaaz:
Leopold, which is he's not an AI doomer.

Ejaaz:
He's also not an AI extreme optimist. He's more of a third in-between thing,

Ejaaz:
a realist, but a really smart one.

Ejaaz:
And he describes him as a pragmatic, cautious optimist or optimism as he's describing the behavior.

Ejaaz:
And that I think is Leopold's secret sauce. It's not the essay.

Ejaaz:
It's not kind of his general push to trading or his investment style.

Ejaaz:
It is his pragmatic, cautious optimism.

Ejaaz:
I think that is it for the rest of the episode. that

Ejaaz:
like I am just I can't get over the fact that he's

Ejaaz:
23 years old Josh for the listeners of this

Ejaaz:
show Limitless is the 23 year

Ejaaz:
old Leopold Ashenbrenner before we turn our

Ejaaz:
billion dollars get in early we know that over 80% and this is a crazy statistic

Ejaaz:
guys 80% of you listening aren't subscribers on YouTube or don't follow us on

Ejaaz:
Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to us it would mean the world to us

Ejaaz:
it helps us out so much give us a five-star rating if you think this is five stars we do

Ejaaz:
and we will see you on the next one we have a bunch of episodes coming out

Josh:
I gotta add a spoiler too please I gotta let people know because our backgrounds

Josh:
are different this time and people might have some questions and the reality of this is that,

Josh:
I'm actually looking at Ejaz in person right now. I can see him through the

Josh:
window. We are staying in the same place. We are in, what's up over there? We are in Argentina.

Josh:
What I'm not realizing, Ejaz, what I failed to compute when I came here is that

Josh:
it's springtime in Argentina, which means there's pollen everywhere and my allergies are insane.

Josh:
So while it feels so nice being outside in shorts and a t-shirt,

Josh:
I cannot breathe right now.

Ejaaz:
Josh has been an absolute trooper, guys. He's doing this for the love, love of the game.

Josh:
But it's great. So once we get the camera situation sorted, I'm hopeful that

Josh:
later in the week we'll have an actual IRL shoot set up, which should be really fun.

Josh:
So that's something to look forward to. But like you just said,

Josh:
do not forget to like, share and subscribe.

Josh:
Share this with your friends who are interested in this. Share this with your

Josh:
friends who you want to get rich or maybe, maybe just maybe do your own analytics

Josh:
and then share it in the description of this video in the comment sections that

Josh:
we can take your ideas and we can start placing some bets because he's been doing well.

Josh:
And I think we all deserve to participate in a little bit of that upside.

Josh:
So thank you all for listening, for watching, wherever you watch this.

Josh:
And we will see you guys in the next one.

Josh:
Hopefully, hopefully with Gemini 3.0.