Pete Huang

Until recently, he was just a name on paper for me.

I mean, back in April, the information had reported that he and another researcher at OpenAI were fired for leaking, and that was pretty much the extent of my exposure to him.

And then I got to reading about his background and his work.

And boy, this is one of those people that you're just blown away by.

So here we go.

Leopold Aschenbrenner from Germany, really curious student, extremely sharp, would be one of those kids that would push for more and keep digging at topics at school.

did quiz bowl and debate and science competitions.

For one of his science projects, he and a teammate built a system that would track and warn and notify you about fine dust levels in Berlin.

And that won the top spot in all of Berlin that year.

Leopold then goes to college in the US at age 15.

He's at Columbia University studying statistics, economics, mathematics.

And of course, he thinks it's completely normal to be there at 15.

He fits right in.

At age 17, between his sophomore and junior years, he publishes a paper, a 100-page thesis titled Existential Risk and Growth.

And in this paper, he's arguing that some of the technology available to humans today could actually threaten human survival and that ultimately faster economic growth will reduce that risk because we can spend more on safety measures.

Remember, this guy is 17 years old and he's spending his days thinking about the relationship between economic growth and human survival.

I don't think there are many 17 year olds in the world that are doing that.

Now this paper gets picked up by a prominent economist named Tyler Cohen who literally says, look, this paper of yours would have been impressive if it was coming out of an MIT PhD program.

Dude, you are 17.

You are a legend of an economics researcher.