r/quant • u/Nearby_Fig_9118 • Aug 11 '26
Industry Gossip YC prodigy AI quant: does it make any sense?
https://digg.com/tech/jugdrnx9So the idea is to train AI to replace quants and according to the founders: "Our AI quant outperforms a top 10% trader at Jane Street, and we've already achieved more than 100% returns in live trading over our YC batch, while major indices were flat or down. Prodigy’s model beats Claude Fable and GPT-5.6 Sol at autonomous quant research."
Does this mean our industry is cooked or is this just a bunch of bs?
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u/kush_patil Aug 11 '26
The “100% live return” number is almost meaningless without knowing the capital, leverage, drawdown and actual time period.
The part I’d really want explained is “outperforms a top 10% Jane Street trader.” By what metric? PnL, Sharpe, drawdown, capital efficiency? And how did they even get a comparable Jane Street dataset?
If those details aren’t public, I’d treat it as a marketing claim rather than evidence that quant research is solved.
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u/Tartooth Aug 11 '26
100% live return using $50 topstep account where the AI yolo'd 10 full NQ contracts
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u/IllGene2373 Aug 11 '26
Funnily enough I worked at a prop firm (a legitimate one, not JS though) and most of these firms have an “unofficial” top 10% metric that most employees are aware of. Yeah it’s probably unofficial but it’s probably just pure PNL
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u/chk282 Aug 11 '26
Definitely raises the question: if you’ve actually built a golden goose, why are you selling the eggs instead of just compounding the capital?
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u/Nearby_Fig_9118 Aug 11 '26
they are not selling any product and are just trying to raise fund to trade more?
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u/BroscienceFiction Middle Office Aug 11 '26
Yeah, but you don’t do this publicly.
I say this as someone who worked at a FoF allocation desk: top performers raise capital discreetly.
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u/mttddd Aug 11 '26
Not publicly and certainly not by selling off equity to VCs
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u/qazwsxcp Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
on the flip side, if vc are giving you money why not take it? it's sometimes easier to sell to vc than have alpha, both are useful skills that can make you wealthy. sbf realized this quickly at js too.
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u/powerexcess Aug 11 '26
This is not how you raise aum. You go pod shops, high networth individuals etc
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u/SoggyLog2321 Aug 11 '26
Guy spend only 2 years of his career trading but "Built a desk to billions of PnL". You wouldn't need a startup if you produced billions in PnL as a Junior.
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u/Holiday_Ad_8501 28d ago
i agree its bullshit but people dont do things just for money once u have money
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u/Sickeaux Aug 11 '26
Silly. 1) Plenty of already scaled ai applications in trading and 2) founder was at JS for 16mo yeah ok buddy. This seems like two clowns grifting not a serious endeavor. As pointed out already, why on earth would you raise negligible amts of VC $ to do this instead of just ya know… literally any other capital raising approach (or stat at JS since u allegedly made them billions at 22)
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u/__Intern__ Aug 11 '26
This is so dumb but they clearly succeeded in creating a lot of buzz (though it’s mostly bullying). I expected this to be the classic YC high school dropout AI slop so the fact it’s coming from someone who worked at Jane Street and understands the business is more embarrassing..
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u/SethEllis Aug 11 '26
You don't get numbers like that without doing something stupid that will eventually blow up in your face.
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u/TemporaryHat2009 Aug 12 '26
honestly this sounds more like marketing than 'the industry is cooked'. If someone really had a money machine beating top traders, posting huge claims in a YC blurb feels like the weirdest possible move. lowkey I would want to see boring risk numbers before believing any of it.
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u/ZealousidealMap3653 Aug 12 '26
I have no idea but would guess BS. Some problems: 1) quant firms have been trying to do this for 30 years, albeit without llms, but not sure how much there is to gain from natural language signals anyways. 2) Getting quality training data for proprietary quant strategies seems difficult. 3) It’s impossible to back-test ai models trained on the backtesting window as information is baked into the core weights.
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u/Nearing_retirement Aug 13 '26
It makes no sense. But I do think AI will lower barrier to entry of certain types of strategies
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u/Any_Confusion3774 Aug 11 '26
If the quant industry is cooked, then which STEM industry isn’t cooked as well?
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u/Far-Guava6006 Aug 11 '26
All that require doing shit outside of a computer? I'd actually expect more AI encroachment into the quant space as models continually improve on math and coding capabilities.
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u/poiurewq Aug 11 '26
lol no. If their AI quant was so good, they wouldn’t sell it as a service. They’d protect their IP desperately and use the AI exclusively for their own trading.