Leopold Aschenbrenner begins his monograph Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead with one striking line: “You can see the future first in San Francisco.”

What follows are 165 pages about what the future of AI will look like, drawn with clarity and theoretical forcefulness. The essay went viral and a new Silicon Valley wunderkind was born.

The fresh-faced 23-year-old—who had been fired from OpenAI and who began his career at FTX’s doomed philanthropy arm—was catapulted to new heights: He now runs a hedge fund managing more than $1.5 billion.

It’s a remarkable story in its own right. And as my colleague Sharon Goldman reported in a recent profile of the German-born Aschenbrenner, the story is all the more notable for the ways in which it’s clearly a sign of the times, and the divisi

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