David Wallace-Wells

speaker

599 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Aug

David Wallace-Wells’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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The Opinions · A.I. Hype Is Running Into Reality · 12 Aug 2026 podcast

I'm David Wallace Wells.

I'm a writer for New York Times Opinion and a columnist for the Times magazine.

We're here today to talk about something very, very big that just happened in the AI economy.

I think we're talking about Situational Awareness, which is a hedge fund run by a guy named Leopold Ashenbrenner, which made a huge bet on the future of AI.

So I first became aware of this guy because of an essay he wrote.

Called

hedge fund kind of grew out of a blog post, which is a remarkable thing given that he also ended up raising tons of money to start the search fund.

To start with

And all these people were reading this blog post, this essay, and thinking the person who wrote this has unique insight into the future of the AI economy, such that we're going to entrust huge amounts of money to his care.

So, what was in that essay?

What did it say about AI?

And the way that people talk about this is they use the phrase CapEx.

Correct.

Well my view is sort of that it's both, right?

So, you know, he was incredibly over leveraged.

Um he

And that meant that he was really exposed to any even short term fluctuations in these patterns that he was projection projecting, which meant that when there were such fluctuations, he was in a really tight spot and ended up having to sell, um, depending on the reporting, almost all or all of his public portfolio in order to cover himself in relatively short order.

Also, this happened like three days before his wedding.

Yes.

Extra drama, the fact that he's twenty four years old.

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