A number of hedge funds have been hiring AI researchers as of late, and Millennium has added itself to the list. Its most recent hire is a PhD nuclear physicist who’s spent time in both fintech and FAANG.
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Aaron Key joined Millennium this week as its head of AI for fixed income technology. Key spent the last three years a senior machine learning scientist but spent the bulk of his career at Bloomberg. He joined the fintech as a graduate in an R&D development role before transitioning to a quant researcher and become head of enterprise quant research and development. He sits within the technology team, rather than on the investment side.
There’s much debate in finance about how AI is going to be used. Virtu Financial CEO Doug Cifu recently told CNBC that AI is an enhancer, allowing trading firms to “leverage [employees’] genius, and their excellence, and their abilities.” He also said, however, that the “millions and millions of lines of code” that make up trading infrastructure “can be kind of rote.” Using AI for him is also about being “a little more efficient with what we do.” He also insinuated that these cost-cuts might benefit the pay packages of finance employees, following the previous comments with “we’ve got rocket scientists… and it’s hard to find a good rocket scientist.”
AI might be helpful to cut costs, but hiring AI researchers isn’t cheap. We looked at AI salaries in hedge funds (and beyond) and found Balyasny and Two Sigma had both hired AI researchers on $250k+ salaries.
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