Invest with AI
01:09:14 · Brett Caughran, Robert Yang
[01:09:14] S1: Yeah, and it and I sort of view my role as like a continuation of what I've been doing the last four years. I've been training human fundamental analysts and you know, sort of sort of joining FRL is a lot about training this digital analyst, which is uh sort of you know interesting opportunity to um uh starting with the skills pack and going into the model weights and yeah, we'll work through how to back like create clean back tests for some of these qualitative signals, uh which is sort of a fascinating exercise. [01:09:46] S0: So yeah. So something I'm really excited about is I think I think it's one thing to be a great investor, right? Like there are lots of people who are who uh who like okay, like really understand their sector, and um, but it's an it's another thing, I would say related, but uh but not the same skill set to be able to teach people, right? Now so I was a teacher myself before, right? So to teach people, you need to not only like know the craft, you need to also have the humility to understand the craft is a little different in every firm, right? And it's not about okay, like this is how you should do it. It's about like I'm gonna provide you the basics so that now you're enabled and you can go on and like do even better things, right? So I think exactly that's aligned with what we're trying to do here, right? It's through our product. And so I'm just like super excited for you to come in and like teach our agents so our agents can then empower the our our clients.
01:10:44 · Brett Caughran, Robert Yang
[01:10:44] S1: Yeah, my first uh my first task is to teach an agent to pass a typical hedge fund interview process, which uh you know we haven't done quite yet, but we're making good progress towards, and uh and then build the FDI, the forward deployed investor team, because that's exactly right. There's obviously huge sensitivities around data security, sandbox, connecting to internal context. But to me, what's been really interesting about the multi-agent structures is the improvement in memory, the improvement in the ability to have recursive sort of auto improvement in the skills. Yeah. Um and almost the same way a hedge fund hires a very talented MBA who has a base level of productivity and uh skills, the way an analyst academy graduate has a base level of fluency and uh investment research. Um there's sort of a sandbox delivery, sandbox delivery where that agent then learns from internal context, internal experience, and uh sort of seems sci-fi, but it feels like the pieces are there to actually we are living in the sci-fi now. [01:11:47] S0: It's like every every couple of weeks I'm like, wow, that's this is sci-fi, and it's uh but it's real, it's it's happening. So yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:11:47 · Robert Yang, Brett Caughran
[01:11:47] S0: It's like every every couple of weeks I'm like, wow, that's this is sci-fi, and it's uh but it's real, it's it's happening. So yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:11:57] S1: The demos so far demos are interesting, and um, and then I think there's just a big training and enablement piece if you have these super agents that can do core parts of your investment process better than you can now, like how do we as humans you know spend our time? How do we re reallocate our time? I mean, certain workflows like that model validation, I think, are now solved problems with the right approach. Um, certain areas like model updates for quarters is a solved problem. Um and so how do you redeploy that freed up time on other parts of the investment process? I think that's a fascinating, fascinating um question as well. [01:12:36] S0: Yeah, yes. It's uh something I found is like okay, Asians seem to be like, I mean, agents are undeniably making us more efficient, but somehow I still work the same number of hours, right? Like I don't I don't like what's going on, right? It's like okay, can can I just can I just work less now? Yeah, yeah, we'll have to, but yeah, I I I bet our I bet the the people who are using AI the most uh in our like client firms are are not resting, are not really resting. They might even get AI psychosis where there was just like over.
01:13:12 · Brett Caughran, Robert Yang
[01:13:12] S1: It's a red queen race. I mean, I think certainly at the top tier of alpha generation. I mean, it's uh it's it's sort of playing poker against other, you know, sort of uh, you know, Tony Stark with the Jarvis suit. And so I think collectively, you know, the the the dumb mistakes humans make will get uh sort of ironed out through better agentic support. Um listen, I I've sort of I I remain bullish on alpha, the alpha opportunity just because of the market microstructure and the distortion of so many market participants. You still have you know quants and indexers and duration constrained pods really you know doing a lot of things that are not a direct expression of a fundamental insight. Um yeah, I think effectively what we're trying to do is build a Jarvis suit for Tony Stark for the for the investor to help the help you know sort of um make good investors better, um which is really uh which is really exciting. It's amazing how fast it's evolved from prompts to sort of multi-agent structure. Yeah, I can't believe it's a good idea. [01:14:13] S0: Yeah, it's just it's wild. Yeah, it's wild. Two years ago, again, two years ago, we were really like investors were impressed that our agents can make a pivot table. Like that's like we like that's two years. It's been it's like we we've gone a long way.
01:14:13 · Robert Yang, Brett Caughran
[01:14:13] S0: Yeah, it's just it's wild. Yeah, it's wild. Two years ago, again, two years ago, we were really like investors were impressed that our agents can make a pivot table. Like that's like we like that's two years. It's been it's like we we've gone a long way. [01:14:31] S1: Yeah. Yeah, not to make this a commercial either, because invest with AI will stay an independent entity, uh, and um you will continue to work to drive the conversation of the intersection AI and investing forward. Um but obviously uh we're gonna try and open source a lot of what we're doing on you know blog, Twitter, etc. Um and uh happy to have conversations with firms that are interesting interested in uh in this in this in this journey. Fundamental edge will continue to operate on the training side uninterrupted. Uh Invest with AI will continue to operate on the podcast uninterrupted. But again, this is uh sort of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to um sort of a really unique moment that the primitives are sort of all coming together in a way that um yeah, just been increasingly uh built conviction that the way investment research done is changing pretty rapidly, probably at an escalating pace. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Thank you so much for for being uh being here, Robert. I'll see I'll see you in the Slack channel after this. [01:15:40] S0: Yeah, yeah. I'll see you. Thanks for having me. [01:15:42] S1: Thanks, Robert. [01:15:44] S0: Bye.