Before OpenAI / situational-awareness he made a lot of money on societal-shift type investments and shorts during the lead up to Covid economic impacts.

His "main thing" is success in calling economic impacts of undervalued large shifts, and the premise of the fund is basically that the same thing is occurring around AI, where he also has specific subject matter expertise.

Well, I don't buy it. There's probably a lot of people who picked out those trends, after all they are just what's in the news. Most of them didn't get 45B to invest.

I'm going to need better evidence to believe he has any skill.

From what I can see, his investors could have just bought AI related stocks themselves.

>There's probably a lot of people who picked out those trends, after all they are just what's in the news

i know nothing about this specific person, but the typical rule is that if it has already reached the general news cycle, you are too late.

That depends on how long the trend lasts for. You could have got into stocks like Apple, Amazon or NVidia very "late" and still made tons of money.

Aschenbrenner only created his Situational Awareness fund 2 years ago, so he wasn't exactly prescient in predicting the rise of AI - he just had enough conviction to go all in, with leverage, on an investing theme that was already pretty obvious.

Nah, why would you say that? AI was in the news at least since ChatGPT 3, and you would have done well to buy eg Nvidia up to now.