Hedge fund Millennium's new head of AI loves these engineers
Hedge fund Millennium has a new head of AI in the form of Gideon Mann. Mann has arrived after spending nine and a half years at Bloomberg and six and a half at Google. He's building a new team at Millennium and if you want to work in AI for a hedge fund, he is the person to know.
Impressing Mann probably means displaying a passion for a particular approach to problem-solving. He's very partial to reverse-engineering.
Reverse engineering is the process of deconstructing something pre-existing to understand it further. It's perhaps more well known of in the physical world than the virtual (it led to things like the Jerry can). It's also relevant to software development, and Mann has been a proponent of it since his time as a post-doctoral researcher.
Mann contributed to a journal on text speech and language technology, Advances in Open Domain Question Answering, back in 2006. His paper was on using reverse-engineering techniques to create a question and answer framework that could be applied to various domains. Even today, Q&A frameworks are synonymous with AI and it wouldn't be surprising if Bloomberg reengineered ChatGPT for its own LLM, BloombergGPT.
Mann's love for reverse engineering often intertwines with his love for video games, or more specifically the hacking of them. He's declared himself a "total fanboy" of a blog post in which a hacker reverse engineered an archaic adventure game built on punch cards (yes, that archaic) and unknown CPU architecture.
TOTAL FANBOY
— Gideon Mann (@gideonmann) September 30, 2019
"We reverse-engineered a program written for a completely custom, unknown CPU architecture, without any documentation for the CPU (no emulator, no ISA reference, nothing) in the span of ten hours." https://t.co/hQ55SvMofB
h/t @newsycombinator
He's also professed his love for speedrunning, a video game practice in which gamers reverse engineer a game's processes and functions to complete it as quickly as possible, often bypassing whole sections or developing entirely new applications and abilities.
So beautiful. Exploiting software vulnerabilities in a video game, discovering glitches in the matrix, and enabling super powers. https://t.co/5wktg5RujX
— Gideon Mann (@gideonmann) July 9, 2019
Millennium says Mann is building a new team to help navigate the AI space. If you want to get a job with the new team, you'll probably be helped if you can provide examples of personal projects that communicate your passion. Projects involving reverse engineering seem mostly likely to catch his eye.
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