They seem to have made a lot of money by investing in his fund, even after this week, so I find it hard to criticize them for it
Aschenbrenner didn't launch the fund alone, his cofounder Carl Shulman had previous experience managing money
We don't know the rest of their portfolio and how situational awareness fits into that (e.g. maybe it's partially a small hedge against AI making Stripe worthless, or who knows)
it is objectively nuts to put a 24-year-old with no experience in charge of a $50B hedge fund
That would indeed be nuts, but I think that's also clearly not what happened. My understanding is that he founded the fund himself, and he initially raised $100-200 million from a bunch of non-EA investors. See https://www.forourposterity.com/
Thanks to their spectacular returns they had a lot more assets under management, but my sense is that this is from normal investors who buy into the "AI is going to be big" thesis and were trying to make a profit.
I also found this article interesting, as well as the fact that Bloom Energy, IREN, Nebius, SanDisk, Micron, CoreWeave, and so on are up 10% to 30% since Wednesday
They certainly lost a lot of money in July and by being forced to sell, but per the WSJ Aschenbrenner wrote that the fund is still up 80% on the year.
The fund doesn't seem to be closing, and it looks like they weren't forced to sell their stake in Anthropic, so it's not clear to me how much of a failure or a success the project as a whole is so far.
If you look at the newest posts on any given day, you'll see a number with 0 or 1 karma. If my understanding is correct, this means they have been downvoted.
I don't think this is correct, you can mouseover the karma score of a post to see the number of votes. E.g. here it has 1 karma from 1 vote (the automatic self-vote that is given when you post) and no downvotes
I think these posts are either not being shown on the frontpage to most people, or don't get voted on before disappearing
Thank you for writing this comment. It made me realize that a main reason I feel uncomfortable talking about effective giving with the wealthiest people I know is that I implicitly worry they might decide to buy a mansion or a yacht, instead of saving thousands of children from death or poverty, depending on how exactly I phrase things. This is not particularly respectful towards them[1] and I'm going to think differently about this going forward, and try to respect their judgment and their character more, and have a lower bar for talking to them about effective giving.
But I want to push back as strongly as I can on this:
I’m left wondering whether part of the concern about cold outreach is that, when it does work, it allows organisations to bypass the existing intermediaries. Middlemen tend not to be enthusiastic about that.
I think it's valuable to flag potential conflicts of interest that might bias someone, and to flag self-promotion, but we should have a very high bar for imputing selfish intent.
Besides being against forum norms, I think these speculations about motives empirically have had significant negative consequences (three examples here), make cooperation harder, and discourage people from doing anything that can be perceived as self-serving (which includes many of the most impactful things someone can work on).
It might be a stretched example, but e.g. you mention in another comment that you had success doing cold outreach. I think it would be much more productive to discuss what makes cold outreach net-positive vs net-negative, and discuss your experience, compared to whether you're defending cold outreach out of personal interest.[2]
One point where I disagree is that I'm more concerned about well-intentioned people genuinely believing their project is extremely valuable, but who lack clear evidence of impact and end up not achieving much. I'm less worried about people deliberately lying/exaggerating to raise money for things they do not themselves believe are impactful.
But of course it's hard to say from the outside, you could always argue that people are secretly doing whatever they're doing just for the money & status, and I've seen people making such claims even when there's tons of evidence to the contrary.
I personally think people worry disproportionately about grift on the EA Forum, while implementation challenges and other considerations seem to be bigger risks in practice. (e.g. I don't think the Wytham project or Dispensers for Safe Water would have been more successful if they had been assigned to more vegan or more frugal people)
The top six posts by karma of 2026 are all criticisms of EA, two of them of CEA explicitly
That would indeed be nuts, but I think that's also clearly not what happened. My understanding is that he founded the fund himself, and he initially raised $100-200 million from a bunch of non-EA investors. See https://www.forourposterity.com/
Thanks to their spectacular returns they had a lot more assets under management, but my sense is that this is from normal investors who buy into the "AI is going to be big" thesis and were trying to make a profit.
I also found this article interesting, as well as the fact that Bloom Energy, IREN, Nebius, SanDisk, Micron, CoreWeave, and so on are up 10% to 30% since Wednesday
They certainly lost a lot of money in July and by being forced to sell, but per the WSJ Aschenbrenner wrote that the fund is still up 80% on the year.
The fund doesn't seem to be closing, and it looks like they weren't forced to sell their stake in Anthropic, so it's not clear to me how much of a failure or a success the project as a whole is so far.
See also this from the Financial Times.
Edit: see also this tweet claiming to be the full letter Aschenbrenner sent to his LPs last night.
Moskovitz confirmed that they are "surging budgets in 2026 across all categories"
https://bsky.app/profile/moskov.goodventures.org/post/3mrdb7fhfqs2w
I expect (most of?) their grantmaking in other areas will be less public, but unprecedentedly massive.
E.g. Dustin Moskovitz is personally aiming to donate ~$5M to Lightcone Commons
They start with a self-strong-upvote, which depends on the user karma https://github.com/centre-for-effective-altruism/ea-forum/blob/27d24f53b7dce59b770040e6ac9ff05fcb9c4b16/src/lib/votes/voteHelpers.ts#L71-L91
I don't think this is correct, you can mouseover the karma score of a post to see the number of votes. E.g. here it has 1 karma from 1 vote (the automatic self-vote that is given when you post) and no downvotes
I think these posts are either not being shown on the frontpage to most people, or don't get voted on before disappearing
Thank you for writing this comment. It made me realize that a main reason I feel uncomfortable talking about effective giving with the wealthiest people I know is that I implicitly worry they might decide to buy a mansion or a yacht, instead of saving thousands of children from death or poverty, depending on how exactly I phrase things. This is not particularly respectful towards them[1] and I'm going to think differently about this going forward, and try to respect their judgment and their character more, and have a lower bar for talking to them about effective giving.
But I want to push back as strongly as I can on this:
I think it's valuable to flag potential conflicts of interest that might bias someone, and to flag self-promotion, but we should have a very high bar for imputing selfish intent.
Besides being against forum norms, I think these speculations about motives empirically have had significant negative consequences (three examples here), make cooperation harder, and discourage people from doing anything that can be perceived as self-serving (which includes many of the most impactful things someone can work on).
It might be a stretched example, but e.g. you mention in another comment that you had success doing cold outreach. I think it would be much more productive to discuss what makes cold outreach net-positive vs net-negative, and discuss your experience, compared to whether you're defending cold outreach out of personal interest.[2]
Although it might be correct, we're all human
Which to be clear I obviously don't think you are
See also this comment which I also agree with.
One point where I disagree is that I'm more concerned about well-intentioned people genuinely believing their project is extremely valuable, but who lack clear evidence of impact and end up not achieving much. I'm less worried about people deliberately lying/exaggerating to raise money for things they do not themselves believe are impactful.
But of course it's hard to say from the outside, you could always argue that people are secretly doing whatever they're doing just for the money & status, and I've seen people making such claims even when there's tons of evidence to the contrary.
Here's another list from Caroline Ellison during the FTX times on valuable signals: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/M44i4CiMECP5Xoorz/demandingness-and-time-money-tradeoffs-are-orthogonal (which I'm not sure I agree with, but I found interesting)
I personally think people worry disproportionately about grift on the EA Forum, while implementation challenges and other considerations seem to be bigger risks in practice. (e.g. I don't think the Wytham project or Dispensers for Safe Water would have been more successful if they had been assigned to more vegan or more frugal people)