Citadel quant the latest to swap finance for OpenAI
Gardening leave can be a welcome reprieve for quantitative researchers at hedge funds, but not everyone wants to spend a year or more doing nothing. If you want to work during your gardening leave, you'll need to do something that's not seen as being in competition with your previous employer. In the past, quants have gone to crypto firms, now they're considering AI.
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Eugene Tang has joined OpenAI in one of its coveted 'member of technical staff' positions. He spent the last two and a half years at Citadel, most recently as a quant researcher in futures and FX. According to Tang, his gardening leave began last month, as did his tenure at OpenAI. It seems that Citadel deemed that OpenAI was not a competitor in Tang's instance, but this does not mean anyone can move from the former to the latter, and its status as a competitor is role dependent.
Quants waiting out their own notice periods to join Citadel can take advantage of its Impact Fellows program, which gives employees the opportunity to work at non-profit organizations in areas like climate science and the criminal justice system. OpenAI's impending move from non-profit to for-profit means you'll be unlikely to work there on this program, but previous fellows have done equally fulfilling things like piloting high altitude balloons to detect wildfires.
Prior to Citadel, Tang spent his career at Two Sigma, which he joined as a graduate after interning there. While there, he was a team lead focused on NLP (natural language processing).
Tang filled out a year-long non-compete at Two Sigma without finding work elsewhere. In that instance, he took another popular route for quants on gardening leave by doing a number of side projects. These included creating an image-to-text model that could create captions for the New Yorker's famous cartoon caption contest, and entering his first Kaggle tournament.
He's not the first person to join OpenAI during a non-compete this year. Jump Trading researcher Bernard Bergeron left the HFT firm's Chicago office in January and joined OpenAI in July. He claims to still be on gardening leave. Jason Ai joined from Hudson River Trading in May, but he was happier to take the paid vacation and fulfilled his nine month non-compete before doing so.
Going from a hedge fund to OpenAI doesn't mean life is going to be any easier. Like the hedge fund world, its thought to have a cutthroat, hard driving culture. Also like the hedge fund world, it pays very well, with the potential to earn up to $650k in salary alone.
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