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Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

blog.janestreet.com

101–110 of 216 posts

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#101
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? If these sectors offered competitive salaries - sure, talent would flock to them. As a former chemist, I struggled to find a job that didn't pay scraps, no matter the industry - from big pharma to advanced materials. Eventually, I just gave up and went into the IT, which is 3x-10x better paid (at the very le…

We let the market dictate how society's resources are allocated. And we see, as a result, how the market is actually not at all interested in the satisfaction and well-being of the people in society.

I always wonder if people do not look for external reasons to avoid doing work or taking decisions themselves.

Most of the people I know do not spend their free time doing research into the satisfaction of society, and do not donate (even what they could!) to great causes. It is not the "market dictates" is "most of people dictate".

And still. I am writing this in an open-source browser, on an open-source operating system. The existence of this tools helps society no matter how you put it. So in fact, if you think of it, there are many people that do not "obey" the market. And this is only one way, there are others.

So maybe rather than "blame the market" be positive and tell us what way did you find to make a difference.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#102
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like that Jane Street hires smart people and supports cool initiatives like ocaml. But don’t fool yourself, they don’t make their money with intelligence. They just do fees and insider trading. [1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/jane-stre...

Very wrong. Arbitrage is not “insider trading”.

They're accused of opening short positions, then pumping and dumping to trigger the shorts. That's not arbitrage.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#103
post #175

[stub for offtopicness]

All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?

People are arguing about the role of these HFTs being a net good etc. They’re missing the point, these bright kids are trading something more profound- a sense of purpose, a higher calling or passion- to simply run adversarial arbitrage and pump their egos up with puzzles.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?

I like that Jane Street hires smart people and supports cool initiatives like ocaml. But don’t fool yourself, they don’t make their money with intelligence. They just do fees and insider trading. [1] https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-24/jane-stre...

Company X sued by company Y shouldn't automatically translate to company X did a bad thing. Companies get sued all the time.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#105
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have a lot of policy levers that are tilted in favor of making money in finance, though, and we could change those levers. - The carried interest loophole - We could add small transaction taxes - We could raise capital gains taxes - We could be a little more focused on enforcing antitrust - We could raise higher end marginal tax rates to reduce the relative attractiveness of off-scale payrate jobs - We could pr…

>long-term societal importance without bringing in any form of centralized resource allocation. The onus is on the biomedicine industry to demonstrate it's capable of producing anything of societal importance because so far it's largely failed to deliver. There's nothing noble or scientific about throwing good money after bad into an industry that's continuously failed to deliver.

More people living more after cancer diagnosis? (ref: https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/people-are...)

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#106
post #175

[stub for offtopicness]

All I think when I see this is "this intelligence wasted on finance and ads." Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great minds doing what, adversarially harvesting margin from the works of others?

> new medicines, etc?

Who says its not? Look up Rentosertib which is underground the different trial phases.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#107
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine human potential if it was somehow applied to crop harvesting efficiency, new medicines, etc? We already have very efficient crop harvesting and Eli Lilly is nearly a $1 Trillion dollar company. Interestingly, the new medicine is designed to keep us from eating so many cheap calories (new weight loss drugs). > Not everything has to be perfectly efficient but it just saddens me to see all these great…

It’s an important function, but the guys making these bets frequently pull down $10-$100M per year, each. That’s a huge toll to extract from the productive economy for playing this game. And then there are the guys managing things like pensions, skimming a percentage every year, just because they happen to be locked into that position, meanwhile underperforming a basket of index funds. Just happily eating away at the…

There's no such thing as money being squandered. Money isn't a resource. It's not food, or energy, or even an allotment of work.

If you try to seize or reduce, what you perceive as excess, wasted money supply, that money supply will simply cease to exist.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#108
post #107
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s an important function, but the guys making these bets frequently pull down $10-$100M per year, each. That’s a huge toll to extract from the productive economy for playing this game. And then there are the guys managing things like pensions, skimming a percentage every year, just because they happen to be locked into that position, meanwhile underperforming a basket of index funds. Just happily eating away at the…

There's no such thing as money being squandered. Money isn't a resource. It's not food, or energy, or even an allotment of work. If you try to seize or reduce, what you perceive as excess, wasted money supply, that money supply will simply cease to exist.

It is when it gets spent - duh!

This endless money-spinning & the larger monetary system is a big scam to steal from actual productive work. How is it fair to normal people that the whole system is rigged such that if they DON'T indulge in all this gambling (ignore the fact that most retail traders are on the sucker-end of the trade), they lose whatever wealth they've stored to inflation ?

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#109
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't we already harvest more food than humans could ever eat, and have a huge pharmaceutical industry? I get what you're saying but these two examples seem counterproductive imho. Which begs the question: what would actually be a good field to apply human potential towards? I agree that finance, sales and ads are very low on that list.

I would imagine that increasing crop yields would do social good primarily via decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land, especially since we're well past Jevons paradox territory with calorie intake I imagine. While the pharmaceutical industry is large, the marginal researcher does still seem to have a pretty positive impact from an outside view. The most positive use of human time probably looks something like…

>decreasing the amount of cultivated farm land

I have good news and bad news for you. Good news: we've known the solution to that for more than a century, which is to reduce livestock consumption, a cause which many smart people have dedicated their lives pushing vegetarian/vegan culture and producing alternatives. Bad news: from my point of view, the masses are not going to give up meat and eggs faster with each additional alternative meat.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#110
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> facilitators enabling the smooth functioning of markets that do Do you think without HFT markets stop functioning properly? What if they are one of the contributors of highly inflated valuations?

HFT doesn't inflate or deflate any valuations. They operate at the market microstructure level and provide liquidity. HFT firms have no impact on the long-term value of assets.

HFTs can siphon away profits from the people actually doing good investing, but Not all HFT is created equal. There have been some pretty high profile instances where HFTs have increased market volatility and caused a "flash crash".

HFTs that trade at the microsecond scale probably aren't valuable to society.

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