BusinessHindustan Times
Wall Street, Silicon Valley battle for math geniuses
in5points
Wall Street quant firms and Silicon Valley AI labs compete for the same pool of math genius graduates.
Top quant firms like Jane Street pay million-dollar starting packages, up from rare anomalies a few years ago.
The AI boom, especially after OpenAI's launch, intensified competition for talent with overlapping skills in machine learning.
Quant firms use AI for trading algorithms; a single star employee's algorithm can generate hundreds of millions of dollars.
Andrew Lai, a MIT ML PhD, chose Optiver over internships at Microsoft and Nvidia, highlighting the pull of quant finance.
