David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…There are so many buyers and sellers every day showing up to trade so many different companies at such high velocity. It’s almost this honeypot for Renaissance’s systems. This is their moment. This is what they were built for. And it’s funny that they’ve just been in kid glove land the whole time with these thinly-traded markets with minimal data. This brings us to Peter Brown and Bob Mercer. In 1993, one of the mathematicians that Jim had recruited to RenTech, a guy named Nick Patterson, gets especially passionate about going out and recruiting new talent along with Jim. And this is (I think) one of the keys to RenTech and the culture there. People want other smart people to come be there, too. Nick sitting there like, this is a joy. I want to go find other best people in the world to hang out with. He had read in the newspaper that IBM was going through cost-cutting and was about to do layoffs. He also knew that the speech recognition group at IBM had some absolutely fantastic mathematical talent. Really what they were doing was, again, another vector in the early AI machine learning research, specifically IBM’s Deep Blue chess project of the time had come out of this group. Peter Brown there was the one that actually spearheaded the project. It’s interesting that you talk about speech recognition as the perfect fit for what they were doing. You might say, why is that? Well, the actual work that goes into speech recognition, natural language processing is kind of the same signal processing that Renaissance is doing to analyze the market.…

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