How is the capital markets sphere reacting to the increasing presence of AI?
At a high level, I think that most teams are pretty excited about the prospects of AI and the opportunities that it presents. Certainly we see very good usage among our teams. Despite this, there are certain concerns, understandably, and hallucination is certainly a topic that people are aware of. But at the end of the day, before trust comes education. It’s about helping folks understand where these models can add value right now and where they can’t.
A lot of the wariness also comes because AI models are known not to be good at certain tasks and this taints opinion when it comes to others. For example, AI models are not good at math – that’s just not what they’re trained to do. The key is to educate [our] internal users and explain that they shouldn’t get spooked because, when it comes to the analytical path, the potential is there.
How is AI already having a positive effect on trading processes?
The traditional ChatGPT system, similar to our design internally, is focused on quick questions and quick answers. It aims to save people 20 to 30 minutes, on average. The deep research system we are working on allows one to rigorously research complex questions for results that can potentially save people 3 to 5 days.
AI has the ability to unlock a lot of productivity for investment professionals, allowing those within capital markets to discover and digest information even faster than they were previously able to do.
You could either be the fastest or you can be best, and we all want to do both but there are a lot of factors to consider.
How are firms across the industry adapting their teams to be more AI-focused?
In the future, our firm, and others, will want every team to effectively be an AI enabled team. At this point in time, however, what is of most benefit to organisations is to take a centralised approach. We have a team that is dedicated to AI as a centre of innovation – with technical expertise, doing research and building tools, but as importantly, looking for opportunities within the firm.
A lot of my role and the role of my team is connecting the dots and finding commonalities across teams at Balyasny. If something is working really well in one team or one vertical, it then becomes about translating that. It’s never a direct translation but taking the lessons about what’s working well somewhere and then adopting it somewhere else allows us to achieve more scale within the firm.