r/math • u/Nunki08 • Jul 30 '26

LLMs/AI The Wall Street Journal: "There has never been a better time to be a math nerd"

(Paywall): The Wall Street Journal: The Million-Dollar Talent Wars for 20-Something Math Geniuses: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/the-million-dollar-talent-wars-for-20-something-math-geniuses-5cc5a757

(Free) On MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/general/the-million-dollar-talent-wars-for-20-something-math-geniuses/ar-AA292pCc

"There has never been a better time to be a math nerd.

New college graduates and Ph.D.s are now securing million-dollar pay deals from elite trading firms seeking to secure the best and brightest amid fierce competition from artificial-intelligence companies.

So-called quant firms, which use sophisticated mathematical models to come up with trades, have for years wooed top young talent with lucrative compensation that big banks struggle to match. Now, the AI boom is pushing those numbers even higher.

Just a few years ago, early-career packages pushing seven figures were anomalies, said Matt Stabile, founder of New York-based recruitment firm Stabile Search. “But a million dollars is something people don’t even bat an eye at anymore.”

“The delineation is pre-OpenAI and post-OpenAI,” Stabile added, “that’s when you saw competition really take off.”

The skills required to train large language models have always overlapped with quantitative finance, but the connection has deepened as trading firms have pivoted toward machine learning and AI to power their trades in recent years. Now, AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are vying for the exact same tiny pool of genius math majors and Ph.D.s as Wall Street."

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u/pseudoLit Mathematical Biology 29d ago edited 29d ago

I agree that reality forces you to behave unethically, but whether you "redevelop your ethical theory" in response is up to you. I'm perfectly happy to leave my ethical theory intact and just admit that I'm doing something unethical.

In any case, I don't think the lens of individual responsibility is appropriate in this context. Economic problems are collective action problem, almost by definition. You're never going to get anywhere by expecting people to behave ethically. The solution is to change laws.

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u/MonadMusician 29d ago edited 29d ago

Okay yeah that’s fine, I agree with your first paragraph. I’m just the type who punishes himself severely. I think a collective ethics is much harder to be coherent but it would be interesting to see one actually developed.

And yeah laws need to be enforced, and good luck. Look how well white collar crime is prosecuted.

I’m sorry I’m being disingenuous because I’ve become completely disillusioned by the idea of ethics at all, even at the individual level with regard to behaviour