# What a $30B Hedge Fund Implosion Really Means for AI — Transcript (2026-07-31)

https://aidailybrief.ai/e/2026-07-31 · Listen: https://pod.link/1680633614

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260731 in_EDIT: [00:00:00] Today on the AI Daily Brief, insane revenue growth, but also a hedge fund blow up? What is going on with AI in markets?

The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, today is one of those episodes where all of the stories in the headlines also fit the theme of the main, so it's gonna be a main only

And second your reminder to come check out the AI Summer Adventure. You can find it at summeradventure.ai. It's a choose your own adventure style program where you can do projects at basically any level of AI learning

Go check it out. I'm excited to see what you do this weekend. But with that let's talk some numbers 

260731 main_EDIT: Today we have two stories that feel on first glance like they're telling totally different stories about the market surrounding AI

On the one hand, we have just absolutely bonkers estimates and real numbers for AI lab revenue

which are in many ways genuinely hard to wrap your [00:01:00] head around. And on the other side

We have the utter implosion

of a wunderkind-led hedge fund

that is surging renewed questions 



about the durability of AI markets

So let's figure out

what stories these two very different events are telling

And where they point for AI markets next

We're gonna start on the revenue side, where both OpenAI and Anthropic appear to be having a resurgence in revenue growth. 

CNBC reported that during a recent all-hands, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told staff that ARR

Annualized recurring revenue for July had exceeded the entire second quarter, adding, "And Q2 was no slouch."

Now, without the full context, it is not exactly clear what Fryer meant, 

and the articles didn't do a lot to clear that up

But the takeaway certainly was that OpenAI had an absolute bonanza of a month

Then on Then on Thursday Axios reported that Anthropic was also seeing revenue skyrocket. indeed, back of the napkin math put Anthropic at a seventy-one billion dollar run rate, up from forty-seven billion in May when they last discussed [00:02:00] revenue. This figure was based on a post from Tae Kim, who was referencing data from AI investment research platform Funda

Meanwhile, their data also showed that OpenAI was sitting just shy of fifty billion in ARR. Now, obviously this data should be treated as a very rough estimate, but it seems directionally correct based on Fryer's comments

It also lines up with estimates from Semi Analysis, who at the beginning of the month wrote that Anthropic is currently operating above sixty billion in ARR and looks set to end the quarter with a billion dollars in profit

And some believe they will just keep going

In a recent blog post, Dwarkesh Patel wrote, " Anthropic likely ends the year with 100 to 150 billion in revenue."

Now, on the one hand, those numbers seem absolutely gobsmacking, but if Anthropic really jumped ten billion in ARR in July alone

It doesn't seem impossible

a, pointing out that Dwarkesh is in a position to have a lot of behind-the-scenes conversations, former Atlantic author Derek Thompson noted that if Anthropic can hit this mark

They will have eclipsed the revenue-generating capacity of Tesla and SpaceX combined

for those not [00:03:00] paying close attention, the surge also felt like it came out of absolutely nowhere Just a week ago, The Wall Street Journal wrote an article about how corporate America hadsuddenly decided to stop blowing money on AI. That is obviously their words, not mine And on the face of it, it seemed reasonable

So much of the media's story aroundenterprise AI for the past few months is CFOs trying to rein in token budgets and substituting expensive frontier AI for open source Chinese models

how the, how the heck did these two companies have One of their best months yet

Two points that I've made repeatedly that I will use this as a chance to reinforce

Which are honestly actually just part and parcel of the same point. And that is We are currently consuming a tiny, even vanishingly small percentage of the total possible demand for intelligence from AI

Nathaniel Whittemore: Yes, 

260731 main_EDIT: we have a very, very limited handful of companies 

who have a portion of their users that are deep enough that they actually have to do things like impose token limits



260731 main_EDIT: but the vast majority of the user base remains on the upswing with miles [00:04:00] and miles of air above them

What's happening in the enterprise is not that companies have decided to stop spending

It's that they are seeing the early warning shots that what they can't do ultimately as AI gets to full mature scale is simply deploy Fable 5 for every single problem they have They are, in other words, looking to get out ahead of a problem which isprimarily the domain of the future by creating more complex AI usage architectures that involve multiple different models 

Nathaniel Whittemore: and smart harness and provisioning arrangements

260731 main_EDIT: But in almost no cases Are companies all of a sudden using less AI?

Now it's my personal opinion that we are going to be on that upswing with miles of air ahead of us in terms of total intelligence demand for years to come

And the reason for that is simply physics. the speed at which demand will increaseis faster and will be faster then our ability to bring more intelligence online It turns out that building the entire slate of infrastructure needed to bring more intelligence online at this scale just takes [00:05:00] longer than the demand grows Which brings me to the second subpoint that I'll make, 

which is that I believe

That every single token that OpenAI or Anthropic produce At almost any cost 

within 

the bands of where they are, will be bought

Nathaniel Whittemore: addition,

260731 main_EDIT: the addition and presence of lower priced models and models that make different trade-offs will be adding to the top line, not subtracting overall

Which is not to say that these companies are going to sit back and marinate only in their high-priced offerings In fact we also just got news that OpenAI is slashing prices. Effective Thursday, the two smaller versions of GPT 5.6 saw a price cut, 

with Luna down 80% to a buck 20 per million output tokens, and Terra down 20% to two dollars per million output tokens. Sole prices were held steady, but OpenAI introduced a new fast mode with a 2.5X speed boost

aware-- now this shows some clear awareness 

that cost is a vector that they need to compete on, and that more efficient models are going to increasingly have a more complicated competitive landscape

but make no mistake This is not a discount sale. because [00:06:00] OpenAI is having any problem selling intelligence

It's strategically leveraging their position to try to shore up a part of the market that could increasingly be a weakness

all of this, now why all of these revenue numbers matter as more than just interesting headlines for podcasts, is that demand for OpenAI and Anthropic models is upstream of everything else in the AI economy

The equation pretty simply is Anthropic revenue going up enough to justify increasingly large expenditures on new CapEx development, i.e. data centers

br- And the finance that's requiring for that build-out

meaning, of course, that the concern is on the inverse. If demand were to fall, none of those things would make financial sense, and it could all come crashing down

But at the moment when it comes to the revenue

It is just nothing but air up there

will, now close listeners will have heard me talk about before the fact that these massive revenue numbers and the shift that they represented from thinking about AI business models in terms of seats to instead thinking about it in thetotal addressable market for tokens is what got a lot of folks off of their Q4 AI bubble worries that were such a big story last year 

[00:07:00] So where have the AI bears focused their concerns this year?

To some extent, the bear case hasn't changed

It's still based on things like concerns about Nvidia's circular deals

Which given recent talks for Nvidia to backstop $250 billion of OpenAI's data center demand have come back louder recently

When it comes to the semiconductor trade, many if not most analysts still view the industry as cyclical, with demand destined to crash. even though in that particular case, I don't know that there's ever been quite as good an example of past results do not guarantee future performance I.e.,

the semiconductor trade now is totally and fundamentally different to what it was before the AI boom

Which to be clear doesn't mean that it can't go badly. It's just not going to go badly for the same cyclical reasons that it did before

And indeed, there's the ever-present argument that AI demand simply can't continue to grow and has perhaps reached the high water mark as cheaper Chinese models become good enough to substitute what, now obviously that's just what I addressed. My position on that is pretty clear.



260731 main_EDIT: however, very importantly

it is very easy for any of us who intersect primarily with one [00:08:00] part or one theme of the market to think that that's the most important thing in markets. However, if you take a quick peek 

outside of the AI ecosystem You'll notice that a lot of the bearish sentiment on AI right now has absolutely nothing to do with AI fundamentals This week, the Federal Reserve declined to raise interest rates, but many analysts now believe a rate hike is coming as soon as inflation picks up

The ongoing fracas of the Iran war is making investors extremely jittery

And from the beginning of the year where we saw macro conditions ripe for a boom in speculative tech stocks, over the past couple of months, the market has transitioned into a decidedly risk off mood

It is important for us to be able to distinguish

when AI-related market prices going down has to do with some change in belief about AI, or whether they are just the biggest stocks being influenced by broader concerns

overall, the Nasdaq is currently down slightly on the year, and despite a strong recovery in July, is once again on the brink of a correction The Mag Seven is basically flat over the past month, and the semiconductor index has taken a twenty-three percent drawdown from June highs The software index is up three [00:09:00] percent for the month, but that represents a rotation out of the AI trade and into the names that were beat up during the SaaSpocalypse

And that's just the US market

which we are continuously surprised to discover is not the only market in the world. 

If you look abroad to South Korea for one globally interconnected example, that market is in absolute shambles.

The major Korean index, known as the KOSPI, is down forty percent in a month Making it the worst stock crash in Korean history. worse than the Asian financial crisis in the '90s, worse than the GFC in 2008 

Now, the Korean stock market is composed very differently to the US. Rather than the major index tracking five hundred stocks, it tracks a hundred, and only a tiny handful of them are large enough to matter. Right up the top of that list are Samsung and SK Hynix, the two major memory producers that make up around fifty percent of the index by themselves.

By way of comparison, the Mag Seven are about thirty percent of the S&P five hundred. The other big difference is the behavior of Korean retail traders. Around 30% of the population actively trades compared to around 0.2% in the [00:10:00] US. They also notoriously love leverage, a word that we are going to talk about a lot in the latter part of this show, to the point that Korean regulators recently banned new leveraged ETFs to protect financial stability According to Goldman Sachs, around 1.2 million Korean accounts were margin called this week, meaning that they had to deposit more money to stay afloat.

That's around 3.4% of the adult population

As many as 360,000 accounts were liquidated meaning they were forced to sell after

failing to meet a margin call

It's always dangerous to try to say market moves are only about this thing versus that thing. And right now you're seeing a competition for interpretations around these particular moves s- to some it's a notoriously cyclical semiconductor industry experiencing a predictable crash as long-term AI demand is questioned.

But on the other hand, there is a very mechanical story playing out as a sizable chunk of the Korean population is forced to sell into a price crash

two thing, those two interpretations have wildly different implications for what this all says about the state of AI markets in general



260731 main_EDIT: Another big story doing the [00:11:00] rounds with AI bears is the problem ofoff-balance sheet debt

As I've been discussing for months, we're at the phase where the hyperscalers are increasingly having to turn 

away from funding the infrastructure build out themselves towards instead turning to debt to fund that build out. Last week, Nikkei Asia did a little digging and came up with some numbers around that.

holding, they believe that hyperscalers are holding one point six five trillion in data center debt

Debt which is largely being held by the companies, not on their balance sheets, but in special purpose vehicles shell c, which are effectively shell companies spun up for the sole purpose of financing individual projects

Shocking, horrifying, terrifying, right? Well, if you listen to the AI bears, this has shadows of subprime. Rather than putting debt on their own balance sheet where they have to disclose it to the market, the hyperscalers are hiding it in shell companies. this debt is sliced and diced into structured credit products and sold off to insurance companies, private credit firms, and pensions.

If you're a California teacher, your pension is exposed to this dangerous and shadowy asset. But that's not really the full story, and the comparisons to subprime tend [00:12:00] not to make it past the surface level

Nathaniel Whittemore: In his 

260731 main_EDIT: fantastic newsletter notes on the crisis Nathan Tankus wrote an extremely detailed comparison between hidden data center debt and the CDOs that brought the financial system to its knees in 2008

Nathaniel Whittemore: 

260731 main_EDIT: and in this particular instance, I do think it is worth noting the source

Nathan is not a David Sacks Silicon Valley venture capitalist 

talking his own book. He's an extremely left-leaning, extremely earnest markets commentator who's been writing this newsletter since COVID

who if you have watched for the last five years or so as I have

is basically temperamentally incapable

Of making an argument that isn't just based on the best information that he can find, regardless of whose talking points it reinforces. In any case, when it comes to this comparison between hidden data center debt collateralized debt obligations, Nathan's core argument is that the hyperscalers are fundamentally a different type of borrower to the subprime borrowers during the financial crisis

Believing that hidden debt will once again break the economy requires you to bet that at least a couple of the hyperscalers go bankrupt

[00:13:00] not struggle to maintain cash flows, not see their stock price cut in half, but actually default on their debts

That is quite a burden of belief 

given the overall strength of these borrowers. Now, the other big difference is how this debt is being used. In the lead-up to the financial crisis, subprime mortgages were repackaged as investment-grade CDOs. They were accepted as basically the same as US government-issued Treasury bills for use in the interbank settlement system.

this was the part of the system that did the most damage when it broke in two thousand and eight, much more so than the crisis being about home prices falling or the collapse of Bear or AIG.

Those were symptoms of the foundations of the financial system falling apart. This time around, no one is pretending that data center debt is the same as Treasury bills. The debt is largely being sold to private credit firms and shoved onto the balance sheets of insurance companies and pension funds.

Now, to be clear, it would be very bad for these organizations if the data center industry collapses and these debts default

But there at this moment at least, are [00:14:00] not the same sort of mechanisms for even those defaults, as improbable as they seem, to cause a systemic crisis in any sort of manner similar to the financial crisis of 2008



260731 main_EDIT: now just because there isn't systemic risk doesn't mean anyone should be flippant around either the current state of debt or the trajectory of debt 

But I think that we should deal with it as it actually is rather than plumbing for this sort of historical analogy, which is mostly interesting for grabbing headlines

Now all of this was the background 

Nathaniel Whittemore: as we entered this week of tech earnings The question on everyone's mind was whether any of the hyperscalers would pull back on CapEx and announce that AI spending was failing to deliver sufficient returns

260731 main_EDIT: Google had already gone first last Wednesday. While growth was strong, they announced their first cash flow negative quarter in years as CapEx overtook profits

And that was the only message investors heard, sending the stock price tumbling This Wednesday saw Meta and Microsoft report on the same night. Meta's earnings were very poorly received, with analysts remaining unclear on what the company's AI strategy actually was. Mark Zuckerberg tiptoed around the idea of renting out spare capacity, [00:15:00] suggesting Meta was still better off keeping it for their own use.

And as for AI sales, Zuckerberg presented a mélange of options

that to many didn't seem to really stack up. He is clearly still set on selling AI agents to consumers, what he calls personal super intelligence.

But it's obvious that consumers by themselves can't justify hundreds of billions of dollars in CapEx, i.e.

Those revenues are much more about seats than about aggregate tokens. Zuckerberg then listed options including enterprise AI, spinning off their internal productivity tools as separate products, and a constellation of new vibe-coded apps. However, he acknowledged that these would all require Meta to flex a, quote, "different muscle," and the stock immediately sank

Microsoft's earnings were a stark contrast. CFO Amy Hood presented a clear message of capital discipline. Earnings were strong, but the big takeaway was Hood's forecast that Microsoft would continue to be cash flow positive for at least the next year. Now, this is a pretty big trade-off for Microsoft.

Azure is booming, reaching one hundred billion in ARR for the first time, and now representing around a quarter of forward revenue. By limiting their CapEx, they are also [00:16:00] limiting growth But it is very clear that they read the room correctly and that the market is not in the mood to want growth at all costs and handsomely rewarded Microsoft for their prudence

challenge for, now the great challenge for all of these companies continues to be

How to get very short-term investors on side enough to be able to continue to do what you need to do for the long term, while also not making too many concessions to what you need in the long term to compete

Rounding out the week was Amazon, who reported strong earnings and a slight CapEx bump. AWS sales are up thirty-seven percent year over year, and that seems good enough for investors to endorse this year's CapEx forecast rising from two hundred billion to two hundred and twenty billion. CEO Andy Jassy explained the increase as increased costs rather than expanded scope, but he also defended the spending as clearly necessary

Jesse said, " Even at that amount, we will still not have enough capacity to meet all the demand we have in 2026, and I believe this dynamic will also be true in 2027. In fact, the demand we already have for 2028 is striking." And this again, friends, is why the acceleration of [00:17:00] revenue for Anthropic and OpenAI matters so much.

Among other effects, it gives the hyperscalers the latitude they need to hike spending to match rising costs and keep the AI trade rolling. The hyperscalers say the demand is still there and it's still rising

th, which brings us to perhaps the wildest story of the week

tech earnings quickly took a back seat as the most famous AI hedge fund blew up. On Friday morning, it was reported that Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund, Situational Awareness, had been liquidated and taken over by Citadel

Now, Leopold has had a crazy story He, like me, was a refugee of FTX madness And he, like me, found his way into AI, intersecting with the industry in a very different spot



260731 main_EDIT: while he was originally at OpenAI He left under some cloud of questions around whether it was disagreements in policy or him speaking too freely about internal matters. but where his story really picked up steam was the summer of 2024 when he dropped that namesake essay, Situational Awareness, a 165-page tome that wokemany on Wall Street up to how fundamentally powerful AI would likely change the [00:18:00] world.

Ashenbrenner used hisnewfound reputation to raise several hundred million dollars to start a hedge fund to bet on the rise of AI. Over the coming months, several billion poured into the fund, and Situational Awareness started posting sector-leading returns. By the middle of 2025

many were viewing Situational Awareness as one of the most successful hedge fund stories ever, and Ashton Brenner as a genuine wunderkind. As recently as the end of Q1, Situational Awareness was still riding high. the fund reported four hundred and thirty-nine percent net returns, 

which is to use a highly technical phrase, absolutely insane for a hedge fund.

Other funds copied their trades meaning its downstream impact was a huge driver in the run-up in neo clouds and semiconductors. A big part of the mystique was that Ashenbrenner was in his early 20s with no finance background And yet

It turns out even AI prodigies with incredible foresights

can get smashed by leverage as well

Earlier this week, the crack started to show. It began with whispers that the fund had been margin called due to the sharp decline in semis

Then on Wednesday, the Financial Times reported that the fund was [00:19:00] seeking additional capital. By Thursday morning, it was all over. Citadel Securities, one of the largest trading firms in the world, had effectively bought out situational awareness

Now, given how much this is going to be seized in the narrative storytelling, it is important here to get technical into unpacking what really happened

By this year, Situational Awareness had grown gigantic. Sources say that they took in about $10 billion in investment capital and had grown that to around $30 billion in equity. However, Ashenbrenner was running the fund at 4X leverage, meaning that the fund had around $120 billion in positions. Even in the hedge fund world, that is pretty extreme and left the fund massively exposed to a drawdown

means b-- leverage means using borrowed money to make a bigger bet than your capital would allow. in, so in the example of situational awareness, the fund has thirty billion of its own money, but at 4X leverage, it controls a hundred and twenty billion of investments, making the other ninety billion effectively borrowed.

Because the investments are four times larger than the fund's actual [00:20:00] equity, every market move is amplified fourfold



260731 main_EDIT: a 5% portfolio move shows up as 20% gains on the fund's 30 billion, but a 25% down move makes the fund 100% wiped out

isn't just, but the question isn't just what's happening in the markets, but what the lenders

expect from a collateral standpoint

A margin call is the lender saying that the cushion backstopping debt has gotten too small and a demand that the borrower either puts in more cash 

to increase that collateral

or be a forced seller of their investments

So continuing with the situational awareness example

At their $120 billion position with $30 billion of their own equity and 90 billion borrowed on leverage, the bank's 90 billion is protected by the fund's $30 billion cushion. Now, if the positions fall 10%, the portfolio loses 12 billion. The fund now only has 18 billion of equity protecting the bank's $90 billion loan.

The banks may decide that that is too thin and demand billions in additional collateral. If the fund can't provide that cash, they have to sell positions and repay some borrowing. Now, critically, this [00:21:00] can force the borrower to sell investments that they still believe in, possibly at terrible prices, simply because the bank will not keep financing them.

And you can probably see how this becomes a vicious cycle. positions fail, banks demand more collateral, the fund sells to raise cash. Those forced sales push prices even lower. Prices going lower produces further losses and more margin calls

You can very quickly lose more than your equity because prices may move faster than positions can be sold. if that $120 billion portfolio plunges 30%, for example, it loses 36 billion, 6 billion more than the fund's 30 billion in equity

The banks would then be owed money that the fund no longer has, so in practice they try to liquidate much earlier precisely to prevent that outcome

and this is why you see this story happening so quickly, this wasn't some protracted month-long drawdown

stocks in Leopold's key area of bets had fallen by enough, that lenders started calling in the positions And as has happened so many times before, 

Leopold couldn't find enough investors to cover the difference and became a forced seller

this, Now [00:22:00] while in some ways this has the look of Markets 101, 

there are some who believe that it's realistic to think that others in the market were pushing for this outcome.

SEC registered funds are required to report their positions, so everyone knew situational awareness was massively long the AI trade and knew the specific stocks that would hurt the most. In an interview with TBPN, Martin Shkreli discussed exactly how this works Paraphrasing just a little bit, he said, " I think some players were already positioning earlier in the week, looking to do what they call shooting against a fund.

If you know somebody has to liquidate, the best thing for you to do is sell all the positions you have in common and then start shorting everything they have. It accelerates the downfall. Very common and sadly very Darwinian

Now, if one believes that this is at least part of the story, it is again another way in which weakness that we've seen in AI names may be driven as much by the structure of markets, and in this case gamesmanship in the markets, as opposed to AI fundamentals

Now, in terms of what happens next, 

the ultimate buyer of the Situational Awareness portfolio, Citadel, is rumored to have gotten a 20% to 50% discount on the [00:23:00] positions. That means there's not really a huge rush to sell it into the market. Now, no fund in the world has the ability to hold $120 billion in exposure indefinitely, but Citadel is certainly among the best placed to sell it off slowly.

Citadel also isn't a directional player. they make money by trading often and always try to maintain a neutral market position. that means that they were naturally hedged against this drawdown and likely aren't in the same vulnerable position as Situational Awareness was

Now, it is also worth contrasting this blow-up with other famous hedge fund failures. When LTCM collapsed in 1994, They were trading currency and bonds on massive leverage. The reason that metastasized into the Asian financial crisis was not because a hedge fund blew up, but because the currency market couldn't absorb their liquidation.

The Bear Stearns collapse in 2008 was a similar issue. They were trading subprime CDOs, but the core reason that caused contagion was because their corporate debt was being used as collateral across Wall Street. In both cases, the funds were touching important parts of the financial system, which allowed their liquidation to become a systemic shock.

This [00:24:00] blow-up, on the other hand, looks more like the Archegos failure in 2021, which you've likely not heard of unless you're in the financial industry. or were also doing a different daily podcast back then That was a $10 billion blowup, so not quite as large as situational awareness, but it was similar in that it was trading tech stocks on massive leverage.

The blowup was painful and likely contributed to the bear market of 2022, but it didn't cause a systemic crisis

It did have downstream effects with one of their prime brokers, Credit Suisse Having to merge into UBS after taking a massive loss One of the big reasons that this time is different is how smoothly the Citadel purchase went. By all accounts, it sounds like the position is still above water

And Citadel is likely well-placed to ride it out. Ken Griffin has seemingly stepped into the role that Warren Buffett played in 2008, or that JP Morgan played in the early 1900s, taking over distressed assets and absorbing the risk of a larger incident Frankly, Wall Street has just become much better at these private market takeovers.

The distress was first publicly reported on Wednesday, and by Thursday morning the deal was done

Ultimately, financial crises are never about equity drawdowns by themselves. It's [00:25:00] when defaults start cascading through the collateral system that there's a major problem I e, stock market crashes are not fun, but they are fundamentally a very different thing to a full-on financial crisis

Nathaniel Whittemore: Kind of 

260731 main_EDIT: confirming all that is the early indications we have around how the market reacts from here. Now that the liquidation is over, there's no mechanical incentive to short the stocks

Some firms could decide to pressure test Citadel, but that's gone very poorly for everyone who's tried in the past. They're just far too big

Earlier in the week, some analysts were already calling the bottom. JPMorgan wrote on Monday that the market was flashing buy signals and was ready to rally

And the market has bounced hard now that the situation is resolved. The Nasdaq was up two point eight percent on Thursday, one of its strongest days in a month. The Korean market, where Situational Awareness had heavy positions, is absolutely ripping. The KOPSI Index ended the Friday session up fifteen percent 

after cruising up as much as seventeen percent earlier in the day

Now, of course, at this stage, this is just a relief rally after a major event

But it is entirely possible that the blow-up of situational awareness could have actually marked a local bottom for [00:26:00] the AI drawdown



260731 main_EDIT: there's a famous phrase that you might have heard some version of before: You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. That's kind of how I feel about AI markets for many of us who are here around the AI Daily Brief.

are, some certainly some of you are professional investors for whom this is all obviously very mission critical and important. But for the average folks who are just trying to understand how AI is going to affect them, 

my argument is that at this point, AI is so integrally tied to so many parts of the economy and so much of the current structure of the economy, that even if you are not primarily an investor, it is worth understanding what's going on

And right now, if we have to sum this all up, the story is one

Continued concerns around circular financing

and just the nature of the debt in general behind the AI build-out, which as I have said in the past

are some of the best pressure release valves when it comes to whether an AI bubble would fully form



260731 main_EDIT: a very notable hedge fund that blew up

not mostly because of AI fundamentals, but because of tried and true issues of leverage

But behind it all, a demand story for AI

which does nothing but continue to grow [00:27:00] Hopefully you feel like you have a better sense of what's going on out there now. For now, that's gonna do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always, and until next time, peace 

​ 

Nathaniel Whittemore's audio recording:
