Three little letters - bnb-side’s name is a play on the local b-side arts festival, but Silicon Valley colossus sees threat to global brand

In one corner is bnb-side, a six-room bed and breakfast on the Isle of Portland – a tiny wedge of limestone tied by a narrow ribbon of shingle to the Dorset coast – that was created to help secure the future of the rock’s much-loved arts festival, b-side.

On the other is Airbnb, the San Francisco-based booking colossus. The battle between them is over the three little letters they share.

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The story piquing the interest of the financial press this morning is that of Leopold Aschenbrenner, the AI Wunderkind (he’s German-born) who has been forced to sell off his fund in a fire sale after the AI boom ran out of steam.

The 24-year-old had persuaded a lot of people to give him a lot of money for a hedge fund, after previously working for OpenAI and the FTX Future Fund, a charitable arm of the fraudulent crypto empire of Sam Bankman-Fried, who is now in prison. Aschenbrenner ploughed that money into debt-fuelled bets on artificial intelligence companies, earning huge returns until he found out that stocks can also fall.

The trader dubbed the “Nostradamus of AI” would have been hard-pressed to foresee how quickly his high-flying hedge fund would run into trouble.

The firm’s rapid downward spiral is a familiar tale, as Silicon Valley and Wall Street once again threw their weight behind a bright-eyed but untested investor who promised this time would be different. “Everybody always wants to find the next golden child,” said one longtime hedge fund executive. “It just keeps happening.”

In less than 24 hours — which included a conversation between Griffin and Aschenbrenner — Griffin’s Citadel hedge fund reached out to Situational Awareness and snapped up the investments at a discount, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified citing private information.

It was a startling reversal for Aschenbrenner, a former researcher at OpenAI who – before starting his hedge fund roughly two years ago — had no previous investment experience. His fledging firm has watched its assets plunge from $45bn at the start of July to about $10bn.