Comment by natrys

3 hours ago

According to an old interview, apparently they were always interested in AI. But finance is just where they had their first success.

> Many of High-Flyer's original team members worked on AI. Back then, we tried a lot of fields before getting our big break in finance, which is complex enough. AGI is probably one of the hardest things we can do next, so for us it was a question of how, not why.

It's a very good interview:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kANyEjDDFWkhSKbcK/two-interv...

Incidentally, Wenfeng is kind of reverse Hassabis. There were some rumours that:

> Hassabis quietly assembled a team of around 20 researchers to develop high-frequency trading algorithms, without Google's approval. When the parent company found out, the project was disbanded.