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Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

blog.janestreet.com

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Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#141

Post by sampo »

state_less wrote: post #58
wittyusername wrote: post #5

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?

> 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…

> We already have very efficient crop harvesting

For some crops we have. But it would be nice to have more diversity, so that the cheapest food options wouldn't be just wheat and corn because they happen to be the crops that are most amenable to mechanized agriculture.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#142

Post by dgacmu »

logicchains wrote: post #43
dgacmu wrote: 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.

You'll note I didn't try to specify what was of import.

We can create mechanisms that enable more people to follow their own idea of what is important instead of merely what is lucrative. Not everyone will agree with the choices other people make, and it wouldn't eliminate money as a motivating factor, it would just slightly reduce the strength of that signal relative to other potential signals such as "I feel like I'm doing something meaningful."

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#143

Post by leesec »

wittyusername wrote: post #5
dang wrote: 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?

Really ignorant take imo. There's so much good technology created because of the wealth created by finance and ads and other boring industries.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#144

Post by crystal_revenge »

whatever1 wrote: post #84
wittyusername wrote: post #5

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...

If you really dive into the mathematics of finance, you quickly realize that the edge is never "we're better at math than you", but a much more fundamental asymmetry in information/control.

Sometimes that's getting information a few seconds faster, sometimes a data source no one else has exploited, but more often than not its something that feels a bit more "unfair".

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#145

Post by codechicago277 »

leesec wrote: post #143
wittyusername wrote: post #5

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?

Really ignorant take imo. There's so much good technology created because of the wealth created by finance and ads and other boring industries.

And also a lot of toxic technology that shouldn’t exist. I agree with parent that many brilliant minds are wasted on zero sum practices at these hedge funds, because the potential profits are so high. It’s a useful social question to ask how we can incentivize the smartest people to work on the most important problems, since naturally there’s little profit in curing obscure diseases.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#146

Post by tourist2d »

user3939382 wrote: post #62
dang wrote: post #175

[stub for offtopicness]

Jane Street skims money from our retirement accounts by building expensive clocks that the rest of us don’t have access to and adversarial queue modeling. We get WWVB and NIST NTP. They say they “add liquidity” as if subsecond trades are some fundamental need in the market. Normal legitimate business settles daily. The contemporary concept of time in banking is inhumane in the strictest sense. These firms are a bligh…

[dead]

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#147

Post by codechicago277 »

skirge wrote: post #32
ViscountPenguin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

to stop war we need to stop being lazy, greedy and most important: envy, which is impossible.

It isn’t all or nothing. The Cuban Missile Crisis should have led to war, but we stopped it. World War I never should have happened. The right answer is to acknowledge envy, greed, and laziness but find solutions to work around these problems.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#148

Post by codechicago277 »

recursive4 wrote: post #89
wittyusername wrote: post #5

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?

To better understand your thinking here, can you illustrate for me a scenario with less liquid markets because firms like JS are less efficient at making them, and the knock-on effects?

Hedge funds make profits in a lot of ways that don’t lead to more liquid markets.

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#149

Post by gloryjulio »

lupire wrote: post #128
dpoloncsak wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I've drank the kool-aid, but I don't understand inflation to be an effect of a 'rigged system'. I think anyway you look at it, it's natural

Money is an IOU. It's not a secret that US central bank policy is to devalue those IOUs at a rate of 2% per year in order to artificially stimulate demand for production.

We can have different opinion on how much inflation is too much. But the universal consensus is that a little bit of inflation is good. It's ok if you think 2% too high. Maybe 1.25% is better.

But we cannot just dispute this basic economic model and thinking that 0 or negative inflation (which would cause the stop of investment), or no consensus(that would just cause more chaos) is better. That's just absurd

Re: Can you reverse engineer our neural network?

#150

Post by ses1984 »

lupire wrote: post #125
ses1984 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

By "pumping and dumping" do you mean "buying and selling" to outsmart other people trying to outsmart them? Did they lie about the financial health of the securities they traded?

You could just read the article.

This is outside my domain, and I don’t know the details, but in many cases Jane street functions as a market maker, market makers have access to information they can exploit to skim from anyone that trades through them, especially retail investors who place market orders.

Pump and dump is a strategy that whales can use to bully smaller traders, not unlike how in poker the smaller your stack is in relation to the minimum bet, the easier it is for someone with a big stack to squeeze you out. This is possible for whales even when they don’t have access to the information that market makers have, and it’s not allowed on many regulated exchanges.

It’s like the reverse of the GameStop short squeeze, except instead of retail investors ganging up, propping up the price to liquidate institutional short positions, it’s an institution using its fat stacks to cause little crashes which they have opened short positions to exploit.

One arm of the firm creates a waves in the price, and the other arm rides the wave.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

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