Three former employees of DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., are currently training a machine to invest in stocks and cryptocurrencies before purchasing price and value changes.
DeepMind Employees Developing AI
The three employees, Martin Schmid, Rudolf Kadlec, and Matej Moravcik, left the AI company in January to launch EquiLibre Technologies. The three also relocated from Edmonton, Canada, to Prague, Czech Republic.
The three developers formerly worked at IBM. In 2017, they created an AI called DeepStack that became the first AI that could beat professional poker players at poker.
Now, the developers are looking to apply some of the concepts to financial markets, such as company stocks and cryptocurrency investments.
Schmid told CNBC that their idea is instead of playing poker, their algorithms will play algorithmic trading. They are also looking into crypto.
The three developers want to use a technique known as reinforcement learning to train an AI system to purchase and sell shares and make a profit.
Reinforcement learning involves training an AI to achieve a certain goal, whether winning a game of chess or accurately spotting a tumor on a mammogram, by rewarding it every time it gets a task done right.
Schmid said he is not concerned about the regulators going after their technology because other tech companies are already doing the same thing.
EquiLibre Technologies is expected to compete with the likes of AI algorithmic stock-picking products such as Yuyostox and Candlestick.
Schmid added that most of the trading out there is already considered algorithmic. They wish to do better algorithms than those already available in other tech companies.
In the next few years, EquiLibre Technologies hopes to either use the AI it develops to underpin a new fund or sell it to a massive institutional bank or sell it to another investor, according to Galaxy Concerns.
Advisory Board of EquiLibre Technologies
The advisory board of EquiLibre Technologies includes two senior staff members of DeepMind that are well known in the field of artificial intelligence, according to Business Insider.
Michael Bowling is the head of DeepMind's Edmonton office, while Richard Sutton co-authored DeepMind's controversial "Reward is enough" paper in 2021.
In the paper, the researchers claim that if you keep rewarding an algorithm every time it does something you want it to, it will eventually begin to show signs of general intelligence.
Several venture capitalists have already backed EquiLibre Technologies. Schmid said it had raised the largest-ever seed round in the Czech Republic, but he refused to reveal the exact number.
Schmid said his understanding is that there is always more money than startups and that venture capitalists are having difficulty finding promising startups.
Schmid and his two co-founders are among a growing number of ex-DeepMind employees raising money from venture capitalists. He said that if you worked at massive tech companies such as DeepMind and Google, it is already expected that you are good.
Schmid added that DeepMind staff are also likely to have a good network of tech contacts that they could recruit.
In October 2021, DeepMind engineers created a new model that could predict precipitation chance.
In November 2021, tech CEO Demis Hassabis shared how DeepMind AI started and expanded.
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Written by Sophie Webster
