Who is Leopold Aschenbrenner, and does the turmoil at his AI-focused hedge fund signal trouble for the wider AI boom?
Eve Cogan and Ulysses Maclaren look at Aschenbrenner’s unusual path from OpenAI researcher to influential investor, and how his writing on rapid AI development
Solving complex problems one piece of software at a time. Demonstrating best practices on SSW Rules and SSW TV.
- Open-source Chinese AI models often look dramatically cheaper than closed-source US models, at least if you only compare token prices. Eve Cogan and Ulysses Maclaren explain why that comparison can be misleading. Some Chinese models may charge far less per token, but Western
- A great example of why we keep revisiting our templates as the .NET ecosystem evolves - thanks, @daniel_mackay 👏 We’ve updated the SSW.VerticalSliceArchitecture template to use Aspire’s native AddEFMigrations. This removes the bespoke MigrationService project and, importantly,
- Bigger does not always mean better value. Fable 5 is a massive model, which makes it expensive to run and pushes token costs higher for users. Opus 4.8 and Opus 5 take a different approach. They are the same size, but benefit from more training, reinforcement learning, and
- The AI race between China and the US is playing out differently than you might expect. While many of the strongest Western AI models are closed-source, China is pushing hard in the opposite direction, making models like Qwen available to download, self-host and modify. Eve

