Everyone in finance is buffing their AI teams, it seems, and hedge fund Balyasny is no exception. It’s recently hired a senior AI researcher from Google, Peter Anderson, who boasts an array of peculiar research projects in the generative AI space.
Anderson joins Balyasny’s applied AI team led by Charlie Flanagan, a former ML and Python instructor at Stanford and fellow Google alumnus. The team created Balyasny’s proprietary ChatGPT equivalent, BAM ChatGPT, which was made available to employees last June and is set to be integrated across the firm’s tech stack in the future. Business Insider says the goal of the bot is to “proactively push relevant information” towards PMs; a recent Quant.Net article says this is something large language models excel at, being able to effectively separate correlation and causation.
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At Google, one of Anderson’s most interesting generative AI projects was Pathdreamer. This was an experimental AI model that could take a singular image of a room in a building and generate other rooms and angles otherwise unseen. You might wonder how this ties into working at a hedge fund, but oftentimes funds have a limited perspective on the broader market… perhaps Anderson will help it see the bigger picture.
Elsewhere, as prompt engineering grows in prominence, Anderson has also been involved in expanding the capabilites of what is, essentially, a new coding language. One of his most recent papers, alongside universities Oxford and Princeton, focused on “prompt expansion,” a different encoding process aimed at creating more variety in AI image generations.
Anderson started his career as a finance and economics graduate. He interned at Goldman Sachs then worked full time at Credit Suisse in equity research for over four years. He then returned to university to study computer science, and got a PhD in machine learning and robotic vision, before taking research roles at both Microsoft and Google.
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