What Takes PhDs Two Months, AI Is Doing In 2 Hours: Billionaire Investor

Citadel is the most profitable hedge fund in history and its founder and CEO Ken Griffin is considered one of the most influential leaders in modern finance.

Citadel, the world's most profitable hedge fund in history, has built an AI system that takes two to three hours to execute a high-level task that took PhD-level employees at the company six to eight weeks. Citadel Founder and CEO Ken Griffin who is widely considered one of the most powerful and influential leaders in modern finance shared this recently with Goldman Sachs partner Raj Mahajan.

"One of our team members built an agentic system to recreate academic papers in finance. And, you know, you have a legion of young masters and PhDs doing this work. It takes roughly six to eight weeks to reproduce a paper."

An agentic system is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that works autonomously with little or no human intervention.

"My colleague built an agentic AI system that would read a paper, reproduce it, verify the results that were published in the paper, produce the results on a sample, and do all this work in about, on average, two or three hours per paper," he said. 

To emphasise the magnitude of the development, Griffin reiterated: "This is not just a white-collar job. This is a master's or PhD-level job."

The billionaire investor and hedge fund boss highlighted that AI advancement has reached a point where it is able to crack really difficult tasks and problems that "most of us would have viewed beyond the reach of AI just two or three years ago."

What Happens To The Humans At Citadel?

Griffin admits that such advancements in AI are bound to have implications on businesses and society. However, he clarified that at Citadel there is no reduction to headcount on the back of this breakthrough. Instead, he believes it will allow the company to grow and solve more problems.

"I have incredibly talented people. We have just a huge swath of problems that we're trying to attack and go after. I will take every single productivity gain I can get because with the talented people we have, we just have more to go after."

Once A Non-Believer

Until recently, Griffin was of the view that Wall Street's AI boosterism was "garbage". Just earlier this year at a panel of the World Economic Forum in Davos, he said that while AI might look impressive on the surface, the moment you dig beneath it, "it's all garbage."
The turning point came after Griffin saw first-hand the kind of rapid AI deployment and productivity surge that was taking place at his own company. "When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man-years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls," he revealed during a recent conversation at the Stanford Business School..

Rajeev Rastogi, Vice President, Machine Learning at Amazon, one of the most respected names in AI in India and globally had told this writer earlier this year that a lot of the work across companies would be replaced by AI. "Today we do a lot of things in every company that are done manually. It will all be replaced by AI so it could be the same use case but also doing it with a lot less cost and with a lot less effort."

A New Wave Of Entrepreneurship

Griffin and Rastogi both agree that some jobs will get automated but AI will also spawn a new wave of entrepreneurship. Professions like translators are going to have a "real problem" Griffin pointed out as AI tools can now seamlessly translate languages. He urged governments to help such workers reskill quickly. 

However, he was quick to add that the rapid advancement of AI will also likely spawn a new age of entrepreneurial activity. "Entrepreneurs will be able to launch new businesses at breathtaking speeds. And will be able to take on incumbents in ways that you just couldn't do five, 10, 15, 20 years ago," Griffin said.

Agentic AI systems would help entrepreneurs run businesses with "just a few people" rather than teams of 30-40 people, he added. 

He is hopeful that "we're going to see a lot of these stories come to light over the next couple of years as entrepreneurs embrace this technology to really take on some very interesting opportunities to create value by meeting the needs of customers."
Overall Griffin remains optimistic, a change from his earlier "depressed" comment when he explained how he felt about rapid AI progress and its imminent "dramatic impact" on society. 

Also read: Why One Of Finance's Most Powerful Leaders Says AI Left Him "Depressed"