FUNDING

23-year-old fired from OpenAI now manages $1.5 billion

Leopold Aschenbrenner got fired from OpenAI for raising security concerns, had zero professional investing experience, and somehow convinced people to hand him $1.5 billion anyway.

The 23-year-old former researcher's long/short hedge fund, “Situational Awareness”, (yes, he named it after his own manifesto) reportedly gained 47% in the first half of 2025 while the S&P 500 managed just 5.5%. Not bad for a kid who got pushed out for raising security concerns.

Aschenbrenner is the latest example of what we might call the "AI Mafia" — the growing network of former lab employees who've parlayed their insider knowledge into new ventures, investment funds and startup empires. Think PayPal Mafia, but with neural networks and a lot more existential dread.

The pattern is everywhere once you start looking:

• Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI and launched Safe Superintelligence, which hit a $32 billion valuation before it even had a product

• Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman — fresh from their Meta's superintelligence recruitment — are backing Aschenbrenner's fund

• Anthropic itself was founded by former OpenAI executives who saw the writing on the wall

These people have seen the technology's development from the inside. Aschenbrenner's strategy exemplifies this insider advantage. He's betting long on semiconductor companies, infrastructure plays and power providers while shorting industries that could get left behind. His backers include the Collison brothers from Stripe, Graham Duncan who organizes the Sohn Investment Conference and Carl Shulman, another AI intellectual who used to work at Peter Thiel's macro hedge fund.

Apollo's chief economist recently warned that AI mania is "worse than 1999's tech bubble," pointing to price-to-earnings ratios that have eclipsed dot-com peak levels. In the late 1990s, venture capitalists admitted they didn't care if companies were profitable because they just needed successful IPOs to cash out.

The AI Mafia is making money off the disruption they helped create. Aschenbrenner literally named his fund after his own manifesto about AI superintelligence. Sam Altman pushes generative AI with OpenAI while simultaneously founding WorldCoin to solve the problems that same AI creates.

When the people building the future leave to get rich off predicting it, their forecasts become suspiciously self-serving. AI might indeed reshape everything, but that doesn't mean giving a 23-year-old $1.5 billion based on six months at OpenAI is smart money.

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MODEL WARS

xAI makes Grok 4 free globally days after GPT-5 launch

Elon Musk's xAI announced Sunday that its flagship AI model Grok 4 is now available to all users worldwide for free, marking a major shift from the paid-only access since its July launch. The move comes just days after OpenAI released GPT-5 to all registered users.

Free users can access Grok 4 through two options:

• Auto mode, which automatically routes complex queries to the advanced model

• Expert mode, which gives direct access to Grok 4's full capabilities for every query

The most powerful version, Grok 4 Heavy, remains exclusive to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers at $300 per month.

xAI is offering "generous usage limits" for a limited time, though exact quotas remain unclear. Some reports suggest limits around five queries per 12 hours, while others indicate more generous temporary allowances. Users must sign in to access Grok 4 as staying logged out restricts access to the older, faster Grok 3.

The expansion also includes free access to Grok Imagine, xAI's image-to-video generation tool, though only for US users initially.

Musk previously indicated plans to integrate advertisements into Grok to help cover the high operational costs of running advanced AI models. The company says the free access will help expand its user base and gather data for future improvements.

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ROBOTICS

New model helps robots predict falling boxes and crosswalk dangers

Nvidia announced Monday at SIGGRAPH a fresh batch of AI models for its Cosmos platform, headlined by Cosmos Reason, a 7-billion-parameter "reasoning" vision language model designed for physical AI applications and robotics.

The announcement builds on Nvidia's world foundation model ecosystem that was first launched at CES in January. While the original Cosmos models focused on generating synthetic video data, the new Cosmos Reason takes a different approach — it's designed to actually understand what's happening in physical spaces and plan accordingly.

The latest releases include Cosmos Transfer-2 for faster synthetic data generation and a distilled version optimized for speed. But Cosmos Reason is the standout, promising to help robots and AI agents think through spatial problems like predicting when "a person stepping into a crosswalk or a box falling from a shelf" might happen.

This represents Nvidia's continued push into what it calls "physical AI" where they are trying to bridge the gap between AI that works well with text and images, and AI that can actually navigate and manipulate the real world. Robotics companies have been struggling with the expensive process of collecting enough real-world training data to make their systems reliable.

Companies like 1X, Skild AI, and others are already testing Cosmos models, suggesting there's real demand for tools that can generate physics-aware synthetic data rather than forcing developers to film thousands of hours of robot footage.

The models are available through Nvidia's API catalog and can be downloaded from Hugging Face, continuing the company's strategy of making advanced AI infrastructure accessible while positioning itself as the essential platform for the next wave of robotics development.

LINKS

• Trump says Intel CEO has ‘amazing story,’ sets cabinet talks

• Reddit will block the Internet Archive

• Claude now has a memory and can reference previous chats 

• AI is creating new billionaires at a record pace

• OpenAI brings back fan-favorite GPT-4o after a massive user revolt

• An AI model for the brain is coming to the ICU

• UK’s AI ambitions clash with its climate goals

• AI that helps residents recycle better deployed in Washington city

• Dialog, a secretive forum led by Peter Thiel, plans a D.C.-area campus

• AI startups are receiving unsolicited term sheets

• The new economics of people in a world of closing doors

• Who’s winning the engineering talent game?

• Meta makes conservative activist an AI bias advisor following lawsuit

• Speak: A new way to learn languages, powered by AI

• Anyscale: Platform to run and scale all your ML and AI workloads

• Jasper: AI that helps marketing teams perform better

• Zero Email: AI-native email client that manages your inbox, so you don't have to

• Replit: Support Engineering Manager

• AI21 Labs: Director of Sales (NA)

• Gong: Director of Demand Generation

• Harvey: Head of Tax

GAMES

POLL RESULTS

Do you think entry-level jobs will disappear?

• No they’re crucial for culture (15%)

• Yes, companies are greedy (52%)

• Need more info / I’m writing in (6%)

• I hope not… (27%)