Hey, I’m Matt. I’m a former Bloomberg News reporter, and you’re reading AI Street, where I report on how Wall Street uses AI. Every Thursday, I cover the week’s biggest AI-in-finance stories, plus original reporting and analysis.
New staff at Goldman Sachs have a new job: managing AI agents.
That’s according to Kevin Sneader, Goldman’s president of Asia Pacific ex-Japan, speaking at an event today in Singapore. Bloomberg’s out with a story on his comments.
“They have to make the most of this virtual army that they’ve now got.”
He also said that figuring out how to reassign existing middle managers will be a “generational challenge for many, many segments.”
Which to me is a … good thing? In the corporate world, I feel like more time is spent talking about work (in meetings) than actually doing work.
I know lots of folks are worried about job security. And I know leaders of the frontier labs have been saying we’re going to have a jobs collapse. But you should ask a labor economist, someone who actually studies the effects of technology and how it impacts work.
That’s what the FT did in this story titled:
Silicon Valley thinks AI will kill jobs. Economists are not convinced.
People have been worried about new technologies taking jobs for a long time, but as the FT story points out, most US jobs are in occupations that didn’t exist in 1940. I.e., new tech creates jobs too:
Wall Street AI hiring surges 49% on demand for agent skills
TL;DR
AI is moving from chatbots you have to prompt to digital colleagues you have to tell what to do, which is creating demand for (human) agent skills.
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Bridgewater’s ‘Artificial Investor’ Returns 16.4%
Over the summer, we discussed Bridgewater’s efforts to build an “artificial investor.”
Reuters recently reported that Bridgewater’s AI fund returned 16.4% through the first nine months of the year, slightly lagging the hedge fund’s flagship Pure Alpha strategy at 18.4%. The S&P 500 gained 11.5% in the same period.
Bridgewater is the only hedge fund I’m aware of that runs a separate fund where AI drives investment decisions. Other hedge funds, like Man Group, use AI to come up with and backtest ideas. But those signals are then folded into the strategies they’re already running. (If you know of any hedge funds running separate AI-driven funds, please let me know.)
With early results like these, more funds may decide to launch their own standalone AI-driven strategies.
TL;DR
Bridgewater’s AI fund beat the S&P 500 through September, offering an early test of whether AI can drive a standalone hedge-fund strategy.
Speaking of Bridgewater…
When I see headlines like this:
...I think back to this Bridgewater piece from last year, which I covered here:
It was written by co-CIO Greg Jensen and Jas Sekhon, then Bridgewater’s chief scientist and head of AI and now chief strategy officer at Google DeepMind.
I think about it because Bridgewater is a hedge fund. Its job is to pick who wins the race, but it does not really care who wins.
The piece offered a very black-and-white view of where this was headed: Companies would spend “whatever it takes” to keep up, even if markets corrected or borrowing costs rose.
About a year later, with tens of billions of dollars in chip financing being assembled for OpenAI, Oracle and SpaceX, that call looks increasingly on the money.
TL;DR
Bridgewater said companies would spend “whatever it takes” to keep up with AI. Wall Street is now assembling tens of billions of dollars in chip financing.
ROUNDUP
What Else I’m Reading
Thoma Bravo-backed BlueMatrix to Acquire Aiera | Press Release
More about Aiera here.
JPMorgan Chase extends lead as world’s most AI-advanced bank | Finextra
The Race Is Already on for Next Summer’s $50,000 Internships | WSJ
AlphaSense unveils SuperAnalyst AI agent | Finextra
Barclays ramps up use of Anthropic’s Claude | Finextra
Nir Bar Dea on AI’s Potential and the Need for Regulation | Bridgewater
Investment Research Stack Should Outlast Model Churn | Traders Magazine
HSBC Plans Deep Job Cuts in UK Wealth Management Business | BBG (I know I said above that AI is not likely to lead to significant job losses but you have to wonder why it’s just one or two banks where AI is leading to deep cuts…)
WorldQuant Announces Winners of the 2026 Int Quant Championship | PR
This Week in AI Street
Agents Think 3x Faster on Dedicated GPUs: Study
STAC, which benchmarks technology for financial firms, tested a workload based on a real-world quant research session supplied by a large US market maker.
“We worked with one of the big quant trading firms to use a real-life example from their agentic quant research sessions,” James Corcoran, STAC’s head of AI, said in an email. “So we know this is representative of what some in the industry are doing.”
STAC replayed 300 requests from the session using DeepSeek-V4-Pro, the same model used in the original session. It ran the requests on a dedicated Lambda cluster containing 16 Nvidia B200 GPUs, then compared the results with DeepSeek’s public API.
When STAC ran a single 300-request research session, the dedicated cluster completed the replay in about 25 minutes. The same requests took roughly 72 to 75 minutes through DeepSeek’s API.
“With this use-case, speed is the name of the game: how quickly can an agent build and test a quant trading model,” Corcoran said. “Time to task completion is extremely important.”
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