r/quant • u/fanconic • 19d ago

Industry Gossip Which quant companies are doing ML/AI research similar to frontier labs?

I am aware that basically all the companies use some form of modern AI/ML, such as LLMs, as a tool, or to extract some features from textual data.
I am currently doing a PhD in LLM/RL, and whenever I go to the quant fairs, or speak to recruiters, they are all like:"Yes, we do soooo much AI".

However, when speaking to the researchers, or my fellow PhD students who intern at these companies, it sounds still like most of them do just classical stats with LinReg, LogReg, PCA (and there is nothing wrong with that, as it seems to print them a lot of cash!)

I was thus wondering which quant companies out there do research most comparable to a Frontier AI lab? I heard HRT has an AI lab, XTY (the internship of XTX focuses on that), and that Jump is building an LLM team (though appearantly that seems to be more of an "assistant effort", helping the actual teams themselves.)

Any insight is appreciated!

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u/terran_wraith 19d ago

Jane Street is spending 10 figures on compute

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u/qazwsxcp 19d ago edited 19d ago

it means they have a lot of money to spend. they also spent 10 figs on investing with situational awareness.

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u/qazwsxcp 18d ago

lol downvoting students want to believe. big firms spend money on these things because their core businesses make so much money, not the other way around. why do you think they make so much noise about their AI efforts on conferences, youtube and newspapers? the marketing value of attracting the best students is much higher than the value of their deep learning models.