Goldman Sachs is one of the banks (cautiously) leading the charge on AI, so much so that it’s already using the technology as a justification to cut staff. Some hedge funds have been on the hype train even earlier, however, and one that has been using generative AI as early as 2019 just poached one of Goldman’s top AI technologists.

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Francesco Maria Delle Fave has joined Two Sigma in London as a senior vice president for AI and machine learning, working on tools that power the quant fund’s research platform. He’s a PhD mathematician that spent the last eight years working at Goldman across a number of roles, including EMEA head of applied AI and EMEA head of its data science and machine learning in quantitative finance (DSML QF) team. He first joined the firm as a quant strat.

Delle Fave has previously professed an interest in reinforcement learning (RL), a comparatively niche AI technique compared to machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). He’s also a big fan of synthetic data. Two Sigma, too, has been working on RL since at least 2021. The fund is also a veteran in the natural language processing space; AI core team lead Mike Schuster said at a Columbia University conference in 2024 that Two Sigma had used generative AI for at least five years and NLP for more than a decade.

Two Sigma’s London office pays staff well; ‘wages and salaries’ in its UK entity were £377k ($507k) per head in its most recent annual accounts via Companies House, above the likes of Citadel and Brevan Howard. In the US, Two Sigma employs AI researchers on $220k in salary alone.

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