Ex-Citizen Quant Head Dan Morillo: AI Outputs Consensus, Not Alpha
minhnguyen · x · 2026-11-15
Former Citadel head of equity quant research Dan Morillo argues AI can't generate alpha yet: trained on tens of millions of documents, it returns essentially the average of what a typical person would say—consensus. "You don't make money off the consensus. You make money off differences." minhnguyen pushes back, noting the analogy to "reading more causes mean reversion" is flawed: more pretraining data does cause mean reversion with minimal specialized RL, but it also increases alignability, which can be exploited with properly crafted RL objectives.
Related event: AI yields consensus, not alpha: two perspectives(2 posts)→
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