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Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

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Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#101

Post by chillydawg »

zump wrote: post #97

God I'm so fucking jealous of computer specialists who work in investment banks. How do I get in without going to Harvard?

They are exactly what they claim to be: specialists. You need to become one in some area that banks deem valuable. Current white-hot areas would be FPGA, machine learning (but you'll also want a PhD in statistics, or at the very least a good degree in it from a good uni) or be a badass systems developer who can write absurdly low latency code in terms of allocation, cache coherency, network sympathy and so on. To get this good, you need to have been doing it for a decade or more, so start now. At the bottom. No one leaves university and gets one of these jobs. They leave university, maybe get a PhD or work for a decade and work up to them. You are jealous of people who have put in thousands of hours of very hard work into their careers, but will you do the same?

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#102

Post by paganel »

chillydawg wrote: post #100
paganel wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, high finance is not just about what you know. It's inevitably about who you know, about "illogical" factors such as salesperson charisma, entertainment, and most importantly, a credible personality type that understands the edge case risks That explains the LIBOR scandal.

And virtually every scandal in human history.

We were talking about the finance industry, which some say that it should be this cold, rational thing where no "personal", charisma-based decisions are ever made, it's all based on offer and demand. Otherwise I do agree with you, our particularities as a species have caused lots of "scandals" in the past (like world-conquerors getting drunk and killing their best friends because of it), but that's to be expected, we're not robots.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#103

Post by chillydawg »

wslh wrote: post #72

I just think that if AI could beat them, they were already replaced. Any innovation in trading is automatically implemented. May be this will be possible in the future but it doesn't depend only on deep learning techniques and having huge samples for learning because they have both.

Organisational inertia is huge at a big investment bank. It might take a decade to change their behaviour significantly, even when they're being out-competed by smaller firms. The big places simply do not need to compete so much due to the pseudo-monopolistic nature of their business.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#104

Post by zump »

chillydawg wrote: post #101
zump wrote: post #97

God I'm so fucking jealous of computer specialists who work in investment banks. How do I get in without going to Harvard?

They are exactly what they claim to be: specialists. You need to become one in some area that banks deem valuable. Current white-hot areas would be FPGA, machine learning (but you'll also want a PhD in statistics, or at the very least a good degree in it from a good uni) or be a badass systems developer who can write absurdly low latency code in terms of allocation, cache coherency, network sympathy and so on. To get…

Got any primers on how to write low-latency code?

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#106

Post by gaius »

qz_ wrote: post #99
sverige wrote: post #88

Well, an equally good question is why do programmers feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc.?

Interesting, I never thought about that. It seems like something very far off, though. Does anyone know about any research currently being done in this field?

Heh, it's the oldest thing there is in the field, almost. FORTRAN and COBOL were invented in the 1950s so that scientists and business managers could write their own programs without having to employ those expensive "programmers" who could write machine code.

Now it's 60+ years later, and there are still human programmers.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#107

Post by chillydawg »

zump wrote: post #104
chillydawg wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are exactly what they claim to be: specialists. You need to become one in some area that banks deem valuable. Current white-hot areas would be FPGA, machine learning (but you'll also want a PhD in statistics, or at the very least a good degree in it from a good uni) or be a badass systems developer who can write absurdly low latency code in terms of allocation, cache coherency, network sympathy and so on. To get…

Got any primers on how to write low-latency code?

Really, you just have to start trying to do it. Find an old, good hashmap library in C somewhere, benchmark it and then try to reach feature and performance parity yourself.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#108

Post by snakeworld »

vegabook wrote: post #92
dougabug wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning is "learning from data." It is not the assumption that there are no dynamics, and that the future will simply be a repetition of the past. To the extent that the future is predictable, learning from data is the best that can be done. The reality is that speech recognition, language translation, face recognition, object classification and detection, semantic segmentation, speech and image synthesis ha…

The difference is that chess, go, etc are all essentially rules based. Finance has very few rules that do not break over time. Just look at QE. Arguably the financial market represents the collective intelligence of a huge amount of very clever people. Machines are only just starting to challenge a single human at a rules-based activity. We're very far from beating a brutally darwinian, impressively adaptive, human h…

QE?

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#109

Post by dougabug »

vegabook wrote: post #92
dougabug wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning is "learning from data." It is not the assumption that there are no dynamics, and that the future will simply be a repetition of the past. To the extent that the future is predictable, learning from data is the best that can be done. The reality is that speech recognition, language translation, face recognition, object classification and detection, semantic segmentation, speech and image synthesis ha…

The difference is that chess, go, etc are all essentially rules based. Finance has very few rules that do not break over time. Just look at QE. Arguably the financial market represents the collective intelligence of a huge amount of very clever people. Machines are only just starting to challenge a single human at a rules-based activity. We're very far from beating a brutally darwinian, impressively adaptive, human h…

What are the rules for image / video captioning? For natural sounding speech synthesis? For realistic image generation? For semantic segmentation? For determining perceptual visual similarity between images?

Frankly, rules based AI is basically a bust compared to learning from data approaches.

The hive was pretty amazing at destabilizing the entire global economy within a brief span following fundamental financial de-regulation.

People flatter themselves in ways which satisfies their egos and self-interest. Of course they want to believe in, and have everyone else credit, their magical superpowers. No government (backstop) wires necessary.

Re: Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?

#110

Post by loup-vaillant »

rimantas wrote: post #89
dougabug wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Machine learning is "learning from data." It is not the assumption that there are no dynamics, and that the future will simply be a repetition of the past. To the extent that the future is predictable, learning from data is the best that can be done. The reality is that speech recognition, language translation, face recognition, object classification and detection, semantic segmentation, speech and image synthesis ha…

Would Alpha go beat the same human on 17x17 or 21x21? Or even 13x13? Let's not get started about self-driving cars…

Maybe not, because it has not been trained for those dimensions. Then again neither have humans (except maybe on 13x13). That could be interesting, but I'm not sure what we could learn from this.
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