Now hedge fund Qube Research and Technologies is building out a "lab" too

Quants and engineers want to work for hedge funds. Hedge funds can pay a lot of money. But really good people want to work for the big AI companies, which are very contemporary and can pay even more.

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With this in mind, perhaps, hedge funds are building labs to increase their credibility among the very top quantitative students. Millennium is starting one. Qube Research and Technologies (QRT) is starting one too. Trading firm Optiver is also in the game.

QRT declined to comment for this article. A webpage about QRT Labs says the initiative began this year. The intention is for QRT's lab to support 70 early career researchers, including PhD students and post doctoral researchers. QRT has partnered with Imperial College and Oxford and Cambridge Universities to host the labs. The participating universities will pursue individual research priorities. They will also run 'scientific events' like seminars and there will be an annual conference. 

QRT's lab appears to be the initiative of Daniel Giamouridis, a quantitative research director there and a former head of systematic strategies at Bank of America. Millennium's lab sounds a bit different and appears to be an internal initiative rather than a university partnership program, based upon reporting by Bloomberg. 

Both new labs, however, have an AI focus in common. QRT says its lab has been initiated in response to, "the growing need for strong mathematical and computational foundations underpinning emerging technologies in areas such as AI, decision-making and complex systems." Millennium's lab is reportedly intended to “provide a highly entrepreneurial environment to attract and retain AI talent.”

Qube has been one of the biggest recruiters among quant hedge funds in the past few years. Recent recruits include Ludovic Thermac from Squarepoint in Paris and Simon Walsh (from Jain Global), Sumit Sarkar (ex-Optiver) and Zhaocheng Yang in Hong Kong. Qube recently hired a campus recruiter in China, suggesting it will be hiring from Chinese universities, too.

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