Why OpenAI and Anthropic Won't Win Finance

What we're seeing right now, though, is that models are smarter than anyone I know, anyone I spend time with.

Imagine if every PM at a hedge fund had 10,000 agents that were just kind of fraternizing, talking about ideas, reading through the notes, pontificating.

And then at the end of, you know, 24 hours of endless debate just gave you one idea.

In 10 years, the world's best investment firms, best banks will have 90 percent of their enterprise value, not in people, but in software and data and systems.

What would you start doing? You would start trying to figure out how do you take all of what lives in the latent minds of your best people and putting it into a system that you own and operate.

There's no part of the business that you hold sacred that is immune to being revolutionized.

You and I have talked many times about this basic question that I'll start with over the last couple of years.

You are effectively trying to build investing super intelligence tools to help investors do their job much faster, better, cheaper, easier, higher quality.

But it's starting to feel like, wow, we're really eating a lot of the core functions that even a very smart analyst or even portfolio manager was doing a couple of years ago.

How do you think about that trajectory as you've seen it and lived it so far and where it's going over the next two years?

I think two years is actually easier to reason about than 10 years or 20 years.

Because in two years, the best investors are going to be figuring out how to reinvent their own firms and reinvent themselves.

And if you look at what happened to market making and quant trading, Jane Street took 15 years to build the dominant franchise.

And the world's best investors today are going to spend the next two to five years figuring out how to integrate AI into what they do.

And, you know, Dario has the great line about everyone's going to have a data center full of geniuses or a country full of geniuses in the data center.

What would Goldman do? What would Millennium do? What would Citadel do if they had a country full of geniuses show up?

It would probably take them a while to figure out how to change the way they work, how to take advantage of that, how to integrate it into their system.

I think figuring out how to apply AI into the investment lifecycle is the biggest challenge over the next five years for every great investor.

So there's been many companies on this trajectory where the product was, Cognition is very famous for like literally their ads now say, remember Devin?

like it's good now. So lots of now clearly great companies with great products had a stage of an AI business where the product stunk and now it's excellent.

If you think about the couple increases in capability that we've seen just from the raw models, could you do the same thing for sort of like the eras of Rogo and its product?

Like you pick how many eras it is. I don't know how you frame it up, but like what it could do at each level up to and including today.

Yeah, I actually tried starting Rogo two times before we got started.

So in high school, I had a friend whose dad was an investment banker who wanted an app for trying to track the basically equity exchange rate of two public companies as they were merging.

And so we tried using really old AI techniques to do that. Terrible.

And then in college, before GB3 came out, we published a paper on AI assistance for econometrics and financial econometrics.

And we tried commercializing at the time and nothing worked at all. And then when we actually started the business, it was when GBD3 came out, pre-Chat GBT.

And so all the early days of Rogo, it was clear how kind of magical it was. You could demo things that were cool.

Nothing, nothing worked at all. I mean, I would say since things actually started to work, the eras are very tied to the model eras, right?

It was 01 Pro and then probably Opus 4.5. O1 Pro was the first time you got enough reliability where it was a good search tool at the very least.

You could say, help me calculate this sort of financial metric for this business over the last 12 quarters.

And it could do it reliably enough where it wasn't so annoying that you would just do it yourself.

And then with Opus 4.5 and the end of last year, the end of 2025, end of the beginning of this year,

the models just became capable of basically anything a junior investment professional or junior banker was doing, as long as you gave it the right instructions and context.

I mean, I think there was a first movers disadvantage for a lot of applied AI companies

because you thought you knew where the world was going and you wanted to build a product for it, but the models weren't quite there.

And so people would try it and go, this is terrible, this is garbage. You have a disadvantage.

For us, we saw that too, but now what we've seen is,

well, if you were right about the end state and where the models were going and you were building towards that, when they get there, it's magical.

And for me, a great product is all the feedback we get every day. People all day are saying, hey, this is transforming the way I work.

I'm saving hundreds of hours a month. I am doing things I never could have done before.

And so I'm smarter as a result and I'm able to make better decisions. And it's delightful and I like using it.

And it brings me joy in my day to day because the UX and the attention to detail and the craftsmanship is so obviously built for me and who I am.