Latest / In the Loop AI / The World’s Best AI Investor is 23 Years Old (Here's What He Owns)

Transcript

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

0:00
Ejaaz: So you've heard of Warren Buffett, you've heard of Ray Dalio,
0:02
Ejaaz: but I bet you haven't heard of Leopold Aschenbrenner,
0:06
Ejaaz: a 23-year-old ex-open AI researcher who raised $1 billion and turned it into
0:11
Ejaaz: $4 billion in under a year.
0:15
Ejaaz: His secret? A 165-page essay which predicted the future of AI over the next decade.
0:22
Ejaaz: And he got a lot of these predictions correct so far.
0:25
Ejaaz: He predicted spending trillions of dollars on the AI capex
0:28
Ejaaz: bubble open airs checked that one off he predicted GPUs becoming
0:31
Ejaaz: as scarce as gold which is pretty much what we're saying he predicted constraints
0:35
Ejaaz: on the energy grid which is exactly what we're saying today but he put his money
0:38
Ejaaz: where his mouth is he made some pretty crazy trades one of the most famous ones
0:42
Ejaaz: being buying intel before the US government took a 10% stake in it and the recent
0:48
Ejaaz: 13F filings of his fund just got released last week.
0:51
Ejaaz: And it reveals his latest newest trade, which might make him billions more.
0:56
Ejaaz: Josh, have you heard of this Leopold guy?
0:59
Josh: This Leopold guy is unbelievably impressive. It's like very few times that you
1:03
Josh: come across someone and you see something that's like, oh my gosh,
1:06
Josh: this guy's amazing. And then you see it over and over and over again.
1:09
Josh: And I kind of want to tell the story that I read earlier this morning when I
1:12
Josh: was preparing for this, which starts in 2023.
1:14
Josh: Because Leopold, he was fresh out of Columbia University. He shows up at OpenAI
1:18
Josh: in 2023, and he's a weird young guy on the super alignment team.
1:21
Josh: Now, you might know some other names on the super alignment team.
1:24
Josh: One of the most noteworthy ones is Ilias Zetskever, one of the largest names
1:28
Josh: now in crypto, who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI.
1:30
Josh: They had a falling out. And basically what happens with Leopold is in 2023,
1:34
Josh: there's a problem at OpenAI.
1:36
Josh: And Leopold writes a security memo that he shares with the OpenAI board saying,
1:40
Josh: hey, we're building this really unbelievably important technology that should
1:44
Josh: be private because we are at a high risk of espionage from China. And
1:48
Josh: That wasn't received very well from the OpenAI Board of Directors because less
1:52
Josh: than one year later, he was fired from the company.
1:54
Josh: What did he do? He left, he went to the drawing board and wrote out a 165-page
1:59
Josh: paper called Situational Awareness, The Decade Ahead.
2:03
Josh: And within that, he wrote about AGI in 2027, he wrote about the path from AGI
2:08
Josh: to super intelligence, and he wrote about the trillion-dollar compute cluster
2:11
Josh: and the power scramble that's going to happen in pursuit of that.
2:14
Josh: Now, this memo went absolutely bonkers on the internet.
2:18
Josh: Everybody read it. Every top CEO in the world of AI and technology,
2:22
Josh: they all read it and they all said, who is this guy? I want to invest some money in him.
2:26
Josh: So Leopold goes and raises $1 billion to start an AI fund.
2:31
Josh: And that's where I'm going to pass it off to you, E.J.S., because that's where
2:33
Josh: the really fun story begins is he went from super alignment to fund manager
2:38
Josh: in the matter of, what, less than
2:40
Josh: two years. and now this fund is blowing everybody else out of the water.
2:44
Josh: So the cool thing for me is that he predicted AGI in 2027, but not only that,
2:49
Josh: he told you exactly how to invest in AI in order to receive the upside that
2:53
Josh: his fund is getting. So that's kind of what we're going to go through now in this episode.
2:56
Ejaaz: Yeah, it's so impressive that he's probably lived multiple people's dreams before
3:01
Ejaaz: he's even hit the age of 25, which is just that you can say for most people.
3:06
Ejaaz: The other thing is he, I must emphasize this, he's had zero experience trading
3:11
Ejaaz: before he raised this fund.
3:13
Ejaaz: He just casually raised a billion dollars, which just kind of shows how convincing
3:17
Ejaaz: his thesis, situational awareness was.
3:20
Ejaaz: So I kind of want to dig into like him raising a billion dollars,
3:25
Ejaaz: Josh, and then what made him like one of the most successful traders of this
3:28
Ejaaz: time. And then we're going to dig into like his latest trade.
3:30
Ejaaz: And I know we're excited about that. so after he raised
3:33
Ejaaz: a billion dollars people were kind of like well what's he going to do like he's
3:36
Ejaaz: kind of predicting but so fast forward sorry
3:39
Ejaaz: rewind about nine months ago
3:42
Ejaaz: um he was claiming that like ai capex was going to reach trillions of dollars
3:46
Ejaaz: and therefore a lot of these compute generating companies these are gpu companies
3:50
Ejaaz: like nvidia but also chip companies or competitors like intel and also things
3:55
Ejaaz: called neoclouds which are kind of like ai compute service providers think AWS,
4:01
Ejaaz: but they hyper-specialize in AI compute called NeoClouds.
4:04
Ejaaz: He was investing in a lot of these companies, which people were like,
4:07
Ejaaz: this is kind of crazy, dude. CapEx is never going to get to this much.
4:10
Ejaaz: You're crazy. You're just a kid. You don't know what you're talking about.
4:13
Ejaaz: Fast forward three months from then, Josh, and we're already talking about hundreds
4:16
Ejaaz: of billions of dollars raised.
4:18
Ejaaz: We're talking about Microsoft, Meta, Google investing hundreds of billions of
4:22
Ejaaz: dollars, Elon investing hundreds of billions of dollars in their own data centers.
4:25
Ejaaz: And now, of course, we're still going to call you on a previous episode,
4:28
Ejaaz: them benefiting so much from signing deals with the Microsofts and the open AIs of the world.
4:33
Ejaaz: And that brings me to the first trade that he absolutely nailed,
4:37
Ejaaz: which was investing in Intel.
4:40
Ejaaz: So originally, his fund took a massive position in Intel.
4:45
Ejaaz: And back then, Intel was kind of considered as the dying competitor to NVIDIA.
4:49
Ejaaz: And they kind of needed saving. They needed some kind of a life-saving ramp for them.
4:56
Ejaaz: And that came in the form, Josh, of the US government, which decided to take
5:00
Ejaaz: a 10% stake in Intel and sent their shares skyrocketing.
5:05
Ejaaz: But most importantly, it sent Leopold's funds
5:08
Ejaaz: call options into the money massively such that it brought it up 50%.
5:13
Ejaaz: So it went from a $1 billion fund to a $1.5 billion fund in under three months. Just insane.
5:20
Josh: AGI is coming in 2027. So how do you take that thesis of AGI coming in 2027
5:24
Josh: and then turn it into investable positions?
5:27
Josh: He's not really a stock picker who later discovered AI.
5:29
Josh: He's kind of like an AGI timeline guy who asked like, okay, well,
5:32
Josh: if my view is right, where are the forced winners and the forced losers?
5:36
Josh: Whereas typical investors, they're kind of like, well, what's cheap?
5:38
Josh: They're looking at PE ratios.
5:40
Josh: Leopold's like, well, what's mispriced because the world itself is about to
5:43
Josh: change categorically and the rest of the world does not agree with me.
5:46
Josh: And that arbitrage is where we're really seeing these big improvements in his
5:49
Josh: portfolio performance.
5:50
Josh: And you could kind of map it directly
5:51
Josh: to his portfolio. He had like a few bottlenecks. One of them was power.
5:55
Josh: One was compute hardware. And one was like secure, well-governed labs,
5:58
Josh: OpenAI being not one of them, which is part of the reason why he problem with them.
6:03
Josh: And power kind of maps to bets like utilities, generators, Bitcoin miners, things like that.
6:08
Josh: And then we have compute hardware, which maps to chip makers,
6:11
Josh: experiment makers and like upstream materials type stuff for batteries and hardware like that.
6:16
Josh: And then we have the secure, well-governed labs, which kind of translates to
6:20
Josh: the elite AI labs like Anthropic and Google.
6:24
Josh: And you kind of see this laid out through the portfolio. So could we get into
6:28
Josh: the portfolio and kind of talk about more of these positions?
6:29
Josh: We had Intel, which was a huge success, but he has like every single position
6:34
Josh: is a success. So what else is there in the portfolio that we should talk about?
6:37
Ejaaz: He has these positions in these things called neoclouds. So
6:41
Ejaaz: you see two tickers on the tweet that i'm showing right now uh one
6:44
Ejaaz: is call iron which is up 6x year to
6:47
Ejaaz: date um this was like back in october 11th right so
6:49
Ejaaz: not too long ago then you have call weave that was up three and
6:52
Ejaaz: a half x year to date um now the best way to
6:55
Ejaaz: think about these two companies josh is that um they
6:58
Ejaaz: are like i said earlier aws but supercharged and specialized towards uh ai compute
7:04
Ejaaz: so a company that would engage services with these types of companies would
7:09
Ejaaz: be a microsoft or a google or a Meta or an OpenAI who want to ramp up compute
7:14
Ejaaz: to train their frontier models,
7:16
Ejaaz: but maybe don't want to invest all the money themselves in setting up the data
7:20
Ejaaz: centers and running it themselves, hiring the technicians, doing all the wiring.
7:23
Ejaaz: They would rather just kind of pay a provider to do it all for them.
7:27
Ejaaz: That is iron. That is CoreWeave. And that's what their main kind of like unique offering is.
7:33
Ejaaz: And so he was like, he made the simple bet, which was simply like,
7:36
Ejaaz: okay, well, demand for compute and GPUs isn't going to die anytime soon.
7:39
Ejaaz: In fact, it's going to probably escalate pretty drastically.
7:42
Ejaaz: And they're not going to want to do it all themselves and take on all that risk.
7:45
Ejaaz: So they're going to invest in hyper-specialized providers.
7:47
Ejaaz: Now, back then, Josh, when he made this bet, that was seen as an insane thing to do.
7:52
Ejaaz: Today, when CoreWeave recently just signed a $19 billion partnership with Microsoft
7:57
Ejaaz: and they did the same thing with OpenAI.
7:58
Ejaaz: By the way, all those companies I mentioned have actually gone ahead and done this.
8:02
Ejaaz: They've committed hundreds of billions of dollars over the next couple of years
8:05
Ejaaz: with these neoclouds. It seems like the most obvious bet ever.
8:08
Ejaaz: The other thing that I think about, Josh, when I'm looking at this portfolio
8:10
Ejaaz: is, has he made, in your opinion, a pretty drastic bet here?
8:15
Ejaaz: Like he's betting on the raw materials. He's betting on the supply chain,
8:18
Ejaaz: which is probably the obvious thing if you think that AI is going to be the
8:22
Ejaaz: most demanding and transformational technology going forwards. Am I crazy?
8:26
Josh: No, I don't think you are. I think he was early and he saw it with clarity and he went all in.
8:30
Josh: And those are three very difficult things for the average person to do.
8:32
Josh: We've been sitting here telegraphing the future every single week on the show.
8:35
Josh: And still, we kind of lacked the foresight to actually go all in ourselves. Yeah.
8:40
Josh: A really interesting example is this company, Core Scientific,
8:43
Josh: because it's known as a risky Bitcoin mining company.
8:46
Josh: And this is kind of a testament to how he thinks, because from Leopold vantage
8:49
Josh: point, he doesn't see a risky Bitcoin mining company.
8:52
Josh: He sees that they run massive power-hungry data centers, that they have power
8:56
Josh: contracts, land contracts, interconnections between all of the two.
8:59
Josh: And if AI soaks up all the demand and spare power, well, miners who are doing
9:03
Josh: Bitcoin can pivot to become weirdly valuable in this world of AI.
9:06
Josh: So he's just kind of seeing this holistically he's like okay we need energy
9:10
Josh: we need infrastructure where does that exist where is it improperly applied
9:13
Josh: to and then how can i how can i profit off of that and so far is he down on
9:18
Josh: any position i think every one of these is up significantly.
9:21
Ejaaz: This is not one billion to four billion over four billion 4.1
9:24
Josh: Billion okay can we talk about that number two because that implies he has multiplied
9:27
Josh: his money by over 3x we talked about the intel one where word on the street
9:31
Josh: he's made a billion dollars in a single day from the intel trade which.
9:35
Ejaaz: Is which is what he did man
9:37
Josh: What else is here?
9:39
Ejaaz: Okay, so I mean, to put that into context, Josh, that makes him the number one
9:44
Ejaaz: hedge fund trader in the world right now.
9:46
Ejaaz: Because it's not like he's trading with a couple of million dollars either.
9:48
Ejaaz: Not even tens or hundreds of millions. It is the brilliant market cap.
9:52
Josh: And this is a 23-year-old on his first try ever doing this.
9:55
Ejaaz: First try ever trading. It's freaking insane.
9:59
Ejaaz: And he's doing this off an essay, which is like even the best part.
10:02
Ejaaz: Like he had this envisioned out.
10:03
Ejaaz: Josh, you just mentioned a company that he's invested in called Core Scientific.
10:08
Ejaaz: I have a crazy tale to tell you about this company. Are you guys ready?
10:11
Josh: Okay, give me some lore.
10:12
Ejaaz: Okay, this is crazy lore over here. Okay, so last week we had an episode where
10:18
Ejaaz: we basically talk about Michael Berry.
10:21
Ejaaz: He's the guy from the Big Short that basically shorted the entire real estate
10:24
Ejaaz: market. 2008 made a heck ton of money.
10:26
Ejaaz: And he came back last week and he was like, I'm shorting companies like CoreWeave
10:29
Ejaaz: because I don't believe there's enough GPU demand and the company's stock prices
10:33
Ejaaz: are way inflated. Turns out he was massively wrong and the day after he made
10:37
Ejaaz: that tweet, his fund shut down, Josh.
10:40
Ejaaz: He had some kind of sensibility around his thesis, right?
10:43
Ejaaz: Because that week, CoreWeave's stock price dropped about 10%.
10:47
Ejaaz: Even though it was up 5.5x this year, it was down 10%. So he was like,
10:53
Ejaaz: this is the bubble popping, right?
10:54
Ejaaz: And if you looked into CoreWeave's earnings reports, which was also released that week,
10:59
Ejaaz: it was revealed that the reason why the stock dumped was because they had a
11:05
Ejaaz: third-party provider that they depended on to deliver the compute that they
11:09
Ejaaz: were trying to scale up, Josh.
11:10
Ejaaz: So I think the numbers were, they promised 250 megawatts of power,
11:14
Ejaaz: but they could only end up delivering 150 megawatts for the rest of the year
11:17
Ejaaz: because this third-party service provider wasn't able to kind of convert its
11:22
Ejaaz: infrastructure into AI GPU supply.
11:25
Ejaaz: Guess the name of that company, of that third-party service provider.
11:28
Josh: Oh, it's not corn scientific, is it? Oh, you bet.
11:31
Ejaaz: You bet. So now let me bring your attention to this tweet that we have up on here, Josh,
11:36
Ejaaz: because it revealed on Friday, last week, Situational Awareness Fund,
11:41
Ejaaz: which is Leopold's Fund's recent 13F findings, which reveals the positions that
11:45
Ejaaz: he's taken, a brand new trade. Josh.
11:48
Ejaaz: He is long, $563 million worth of CoreWeave stock.
11:53
Ejaaz: And if you notice just underneath that, almost $400 billion in a company called Core Scientific.
12:00
Ejaaz: So this is basically a massive, almost $1 billion bet on CoreWeave to be the
12:07
Ejaaz: leading neocloud provider.
12:09
Ejaaz: He's giving us all the signs and signals that this is the company,
12:12
Ejaaz: all the two companies to back.
12:14
Josh: This is fascinating too, because I recently, I was watching the show Billions,
12:18
Josh: where it's about this guy, this big hedge fund guy, and he runs a private fund
12:21
Josh: and he sometimes does hostile takeovers of company in order to get his way with things.
12:25
Josh: And that very much feels like that's what Leopold is doing. I think he owned
12:28
Josh: 6.8% and now it's up to 9% of the company, which means that he likely gets some
12:33
Josh: sort of seat at the board or some sort of say in what happens.
12:36
Josh: And he could actually control the destiny of these companies that were previously
12:39
Josh: for Bitcoin mining rigs, moving them over to the AI world and working together
12:44
Josh: with CoreWeave. And it's this self-fulfilling prophecy.
12:46
Josh: And it's funny because you cannot possibly be more in.
12:50
Josh: He is hedging with the risk that is going to merge together into even more risk.
12:55
Josh: But he has a hands-on perspective
12:57
Josh: view on how he's doing this now he's operating this so it implies that there's
13:01
Josh: more people on the team that are helping with this this is a lot of very difficult
13:03
Josh: complicated things to do but it's all seemingly going according to plan thus far.
13:08
Ejaaz: Yeah i mean he like i said he's probably like the
13:11
Ejaaz: world's best trader right now at this at this point he's just hitting win after
13:14
Ejaaz: win which just doesn't happen especially with capital that he's trading at this
13:17
Ejaaz: size um the way i kind of think about this josh is he's gone levered long core
13:23
Ejaaz: weave because he's bought the riskiest asset that is either on or technically
13:28
Ejaaz: off CoreWeave's balance sheet,
13:30
Ejaaz: which is this provider, which is letting them down right now.
13:33
Ejaaz: So I'm guessing if he owns, what did you say, a 9% stake in Core Scientific?
13:38
Josh: Correct.
13:39
Ejaaz: Right. He probably has a board seat on that company, right?
13:41
Ejaaz: So he's probably advising them in their ear, day in, day out,
13:45
Ejaaz: how to construct their GPU supply such that
13:48
Ejaaz: you know, they can meet the goals that CoreWeave has set for them.
13:51
Ejaaz: So that CoreWeave's stock earnings next quarter is up only, stock pumps,
13:57
Ejaaz: and all their partnerships with OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Microsoft,
14:01
Ejaaz: let's play the violin, does extremely well, right?
14:04
Ejaaz: Because like he, like, it gets the kind of like domino effect of stock appreciation
14:10
Ejaaz: for all these partnerships that they've already signed.
14:12
Ejaaz: So this is incredibly risky thing.
14:15
Ejaaz: Will it pay off? I don't know. But So far, his track record kind of presumes,
14:18
Josh: Hey, well, so far, it is definitely paying off.
14:21
Josh: And that leaves me with two questions that I want to get to to kind of conclude
14:24
Josh: the second part of the show, which is one, how do we participate?
14:28
Josh: What does this portfolio look like? Where are the opportunities for us still available?
14:32
Josh: And two, is he just having the best luckiest year of his life,
14:34
Josh: or is this actually a durable strategy?
14:36
Josh: So maybe we start with the first one, which is portfolio breakdown and how we
14:40
Josh: want to think about how we can not necessarily emulate this,
14:43
Josh: not investment advice but think about how he considers his bets and see which
14:46
Josh: ones we think that are worth placing ourselves okay i'm getting fomo that's
14:50
Josh: okay like three x return in one year is crazy i want in on.
14:52
Ejaaz: This i am also getting fomo um so i josh like not financial advice but i'm showing
14:57
Ejaaz: you a tweet which literally has the tickers carved out for the entire let me
15:01
Ejaaz: screenshot hold on yeah please screenshot it okay and for those of you listening
15:05
Ejaaz: you know up to you whether you want to do that as well
15:07
Ejaaz: What's good about this is he's ranked these tickers on this tweet in terms of
15:12
Ejaaz: how sized he is in this position.
15:14
Ejaaz: So the ticker that isn't in here, that is still his biggest size, is Intel.
15:19
Ejaaz: He's got a huge call position on there. And that's his Bitcoin.
15:23
Ejaaz: That's his steady state investment, right?
15:25
Ejaaz: And then he has CoreWeave, which is now his new second largest position at almost $600 million.
15:31
Ejaaz: Then he has Core Scientific at, I think it was around $360 million.
15:36
Ejaaz: And then as you go down this kind of list, IRON, CIFR, Hutt,
15:40
Ejaaz: Riot, these are all much smaller positions, but much riskier bets.
15:44
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.
15:49
Ejaaz: And then, do you have any, sorry, do you have anything to say?
15:51
Ejaaz: No, no, no, please keep going.
15:52
Ejaaz: And then to answer your second question, Josh, you know, will this thing kind of play out?
15:57
Ejaaz: Well, let me introduce you to this tweet, which talks about the top five most
16:01
Ejaaz: contracted AI compute capacity in development.
16:05
Josh: Those stickers look familiar.
16:06
Ejaaz: Yeah. Do those stickers look familiar to you, Josh? Oh, look,
16:09
Ejaaz: there's Iron that is committed to 2.9 gigawatts of power.
16:14
Ejaaz: There's CoreWeave at 2.9 gigawatts of power.
16:17
Ejaaz: And there's CIFR at 2.6 gigawatts of power.
16:20
Ejaaz: And Enbys, which the fund did have a position. I don't know whether it still
16:23
Ejaaz: has a position in. The point being, that is what?
16:26
Ejaaz: Three, six, let's call it nine gigawatts of power, Josh. That translates into
16:31
Ejaaz: hundreds of billions of dollars.
16:33
Ejaaz: Who's spending all this money? It's cashflow positive mag seven companies, baby.
16:38
Ejaaz: It is Meta. It is Google who all have like crazy balance sheets that can afford this spend.
16:44
Ejaaz: So it's not like it's even in a bubble where it's a levered bet for those kinds of companies.
16:48
Ejaaz: This is just like agreements that they've made and signed that are inevitably
16:52
Ejaaz: going to be fulfilled. Crazy.
16:54
Josh: This is what we talk about with that, that layer stack where there's like the
16:58
Josh: core infrastructure, then chips, then there's energy, and then there's the app
17:01
Josh: layer, and then there's the like APIs.
17:03
Josh: It's like he's, I guess you could think of this as like, we have the conglomerates,
17:08
Josh: we have Google, we have Meta, we have those big ones that you described.
17:10
Josh: They're bringing in tons of cash. They just have very durable businesses that
17:13
Josh: are super cashflow positive, make tons of profit.
17:16
Josh: They're sending their profits to the companies that can do the hard work for them,
17:20
Josh: that could build the infrastructure, that could create these AI labs that they just
17:23
Josh: don't want to do one noteworthy one actually as i'm describing this is oracle
17:26
Josh: because i believe oracle is partnered with open ai to build a lot of their ai
17:30
Josh: infrastructure the biggest um so do you have any idea why something like that
17:35
Josh: would be missing because that seemingly feels obvious to add to this position
17:38
Josh: or maybe it's just too big to fit into this category because it seems like he has,
17:42
Josh: megabets and then some minibets and oracle could perhaps be a weird middleman
17:46
Josh: that doesn't quite fit the mold?
17:48
Ejaaz: Honestly, it's a good question. So my head immediately goes to two things.
17:53
Ejaaz: One, I think it's more of a middleman play than the safe bet that he's already
17:57
Ejaaz: kind of taken with conviction, which was Intel.
18:00
Ejaaz: And that was probably a much better bet that he would take over and over again
18:04
Ejaaz: because he invested pre the government taking 10%, right?
18:07
Ejaaz: That government state kind of gives it any kind of investor safety that like,
18:11
Ejaaz: oh, the government's got it.
18:12
Ejaaz: It's not a bailout per se, but it's more of like a, I think this stock probably
18:17
Ejaaz: isn't going down and they're going to sign a bunch of future partnerships, right?
18:20
Ejaaz: Like with the government's help, Intel signed a massive partnership.
18:23
Ejaaz: I think it was like $100 billion worth of GPUs with NVIDIA and like all these
18:28
Ejaaz: kind of like alliances, which you wouldn't expect.
18:30
Ejaaz: So I think he's kind of fine with the Oracle side of things.
18:32
Ejaaz: What's interesting to me, Josh, and I'm curious what your take is,
18:35
Ejaaz: because you and I have gone back and forth on this.
18:37
Ejaaz: Listen, you and I both know GPUs are super essential, right?
18:41
Ejaaz: But we talked about Satya Nadella from Microsoft last week, basically saying that...
18:48
Ejaaz: A lot of his GPUs that he's already bought, hundreds of millions of dollars
18:51
Ejaaz: worth, are collecting dust. What was the reason? Didn't have any energy.
18:55
Ejaaz: Didn't have any grid supply for that. I don't see any tickers necessarily that
19:00
Ejaaz: are directly on the energy supply train here.
19:03
Ejaaz: He's gone kind of like for the AI compute provider, which they kind of have
19:07
Ejaaz: involvement in setting up the data compute and the grid supply,
19:09
Ejaaz: but like nothing directly there.
19:11
Ejaaz: Like, is that something that he's missing? Is that something that you and I
19:13
Ejaaz: maybe have alpha on? I don't know.
19:16
Josh: Maybe, but I wonder if it really exists Because when I think of these companies,
19:19
Josh: I'm not sure how many are actually in the business of generating power energy.
19:24
Josh: Like when I think of that, I know Siemens is a company. It's a,
19:27
Josh: it's a European company, actually. It's not even traded on the New York Stock Exchange.
19:30
Josh: They specialize in making these gas turbines that a lot of, not gas turbines
19:34
Josh: that a lot of these power centers are using, but their backlog is for like years and years of time.
19:39
Josh: So I wonder if there's just genuinely a shortage of large companies that are
19:44
Josh: doing it. and it's more of a distributed effort in terms of who is actually
19:48
Josh: able to get power to these data centers.
19:50
Josh: So that could be why, that's my best guess. I'm not totally sure.
19:54
Ejaaz: I mean, he knows who the biggest consumers are going to be, regardless of who
19:57
Ejaaz: builds the energy, right?
19:58
Ejaaz: So maybe the way he's thinking about it is it's too risky, to your point,
20:02
Ejaaz: Josh, to bet on who the energy suppliers are going to be.
20:05
Ejaaz: Let them figure that out. But I know once they have ramped up their energy,
20:08
Ejaaz: and boy, will they, because the demand is overflowing at this point,
20:12
Ejaaz: it's going to flow directly into these companies, these neoclouds,
20:15
Ejaaz: because that's who all the tens of billions and hundreds of billions of dollar
20:18
Ejaaz: partnerships are being signed by the hyperscalers.
20:20
Josh: But what a great masterclass in conviction. And like really having the foresight
20:24
Josh: to see where the puck is going, going all in and creating this essay,
20:28
Josh: getting a billion dollars fundraise, deploying it, and then actually hitting.
20:31
Josh: Now, that leaves me with, I guess, this final point that I want to ask you,
20:36
Josh: Ejaz, because he's not really betting on AI. Well, he is, but he's not betting entirely on AI.
20:40
Josh: He's betting that his timing of AI, which is this 2027-ish AGI, is right.
20:45
Josh: And if that's off by a couple years, by a decade, you very quickly go from genius to cautionary tale.
20:51
Josh: And so far it's working, and so far there have been no gluts,
20:54
Josh: But with everybody screaming bubble, with everyone screaming,
20:57
Josh: you know, there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. The prices of lots of stocks are going down.
21:01
Josh: Is this a stroke of luck or is there real genius? I suspect it exists somewhere
21:06
Josh: in between. But I'm curious what you think about that.
21:09
Ejaaz: Leopold is the smartest investor in AI. I think you and I probably might agree
21:13
Ejaaz: with that right now. Turning one bill to four bill is pretty nuts.
21:16
Ejaaz: The smartest man in AI could theoretically be Sam Altman.
21:21
Ejaaz: And sam altman recently released his
21:24
Ejaaz: roadmap for open ai do you remember when he
21:27
Ejaaz: said he would achieve agi like a core
21:30
Ejaaz: research scientist so ai is curing cancer yes it was 27 i believe no was it
21:36
Ejaaz: oh wait oh wait maybe i don't know no no okay what's a decade no no so so okay
21:43
Ejaaz: so i i might be cheating a little bit here but he said that we would re we would reach um
21:50
Ejaaz: expert research, scientific grade AI by the end of 2027. He said,
21:56
Ejaaz: we're going to get the AI research intern by the end of next year, 2026.
22:00
Ejaaz: So technically, if we had an AI that was producing, you know,
22:05
Ejaaz: potential cures for cancer or cures for like things that kind of like cured
22:08
Ejaaz: trillions of dollars worth of ailments or whatever that might be,
22:11
Ejaaz: I would say that's somewhat on the verge of AI.
22:13
Ejaaz: And I can imagine a model that powerful, what could it be from the consumer
22:16
Ejaaz: side? That would be chat GPT 5.1 on steroids.
22:20
Ejaaz: So if I had to guess, with all the bets that have paid off so far with Leopold,
22:25
Ejaaz: and I'm guessing he's updating his thinking over and over again.
22:27
Ejaaz: He's seeing kind of decades in advance at this point.
22:30
Ejaaz: He might be right. I don't know whether, like, he might be right. What do you think?
22:34
Josh: You think I'm crazy? I think it probably doesn't matter to an extent.
22:39
Josh: Because the gains will be so large in the meantime. Like, he's collected that
22:43
Josh: zero to one on all these companies.
22:44
Josh: Like, he bought a Bitcoin mining company that nobody cared about.
22:47
Josh: And now it is going to be an AGI mining company.
22:50
Josh: And that like delta between the like, nobody cares about this to,
22:54
Josh: oh my gosh, this is so valuable is very high.
22:56
Josh: And just collecting that alone means that the timing probably means a little bit less.
23:00
Josh: And I guess the takeaway for myself and everyone listening is that you don't
23:03
Josh: really have to agree with his AGI timeline exactly, but there's something to
23:08
Josh: learn from the way that he starts with a worldview and then looks for these
23:11
Josh: choke points and then asks,
23:13
Josh: where's the market still pricing the old world instead of the new one?
23:17
Josh: And I think that's kind of how I'm going to leave this episode with is,
23:20
Josh: is where is the world not seeing a future that I believe?
23:25
Josh: Like, where is there misalignment? And where is there an advantage there?
23:28
Josh: And Leopold with this fund has clearly shown that there is a huge arbitrage
23:32
Josh: opportunity for those with the eye and the will to actually seek these out and pursue them.
23:36
Ejaaz: Really well said. I want to end with this term that Nick Carter used to describe
23:43
Ejaaz: Leopold, which is he's not an AI doomer.
23:48
Ejaaz: He's also not an AI extreme optimist. He's more of a third in-between thing,
23:54
Ejaaz: a realist, but a really smart one.
23:56
Ejaaz: And he describes him as a pragmatic, cautious optimist or optimism as he's describing the behavior.
24:02
Ejaaz: And that I think is Leopold's secret sauce. It's not the essay.
24:07
Ejaaz: It's not kind of his general push to trading or his investment style.
24:11
Ejaaz: It is his pragmatic, cautious optimism.
24:15
Ejaaz: I think that is it for the rest of the episode. that
24:18
Ejaaz: like I am just I can't get over the fact that he's
24:21
Ejaaz: 23 years old Josh for the listeners of this
24:24
Ejaaz: show Limitless is the 23 year
24:27
Ejaaz: old Leopold Ashenbrenner before we turn our
24:30
Ejaaz: billion dollars get in early we know that over 80% and this is a crazy statistic
24:36
Ejaaz: guys 80% of you listening aren't subscribers on YouTube or don't follow us on
24:42
Ejaaz: Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to us it would mean the world to us
24:45
Ejaaz: it helps us out so much give us a five-star rating if you think this is five stars we do
24:49
Ejaaz: and we will see you on the next one we have a bunch of episodes coming out
24:53
Josh: I gotta add a spoiler too please I gotta let people know because our backgrounds
24:56
Josh: are different this time and people might have some questions and the reality of this is that,
25:01
Josh: I'm actually looking at Ejaz in person right now. I can see him through the
25:03
Josh: window. We are staying in the same place. We are in, what's up over there? We are in Argentina.
25:09
Josh: What I'm not realizing, Ejaz, what I failed to compute when I came here is that
25:12
Josh: it's springtime in Argentina, which means there's pollen everywhere and my allergies are insane.
25:17
Josh: So while it feels so nice being outside in shorts and a t-shirt,
25:20
Josh: I cannot breathe right now.
25:22
Ejaaz: Josh has been an absolute trooper, guys. He's doing this for the love, love of the game.
25:27
Josh: But it's great. So once we get the camera situation sorted, I'm hopeful that
25:31
Josh: later in the week we'll have an actual IRL shoot set up, which should be really fun.
25:35
Josh: So that's something to look forward to. But like you just said,
25:37
Josh: do not forget to like, share and subscribe.
25:40
Josh: Share this with your friends who are interested in this. Share this with your
25:42
Josh: friends who you want to get rich or maybe, maybe just maybe do your own analytics
25:47
Josh: and then share it in the description of this video in the comment sections that
25:50
Josh: we can take your ideas and we can start placing some bets because he's been doing well.
25:54
Josh: And I think we all deserve to participate in a little bit of that upside.
25:57
Josh: So thank you all for listening, for watching, wherever you watch this.
26:00
Josh: And we will see you guys in the next one.
26:02
Josh: Hopefully, hopefully with Gemini 3.0.