(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Alex Gerko’s quantitative-trading firm XTX Markets has donated $9.2 million to a new fund that aims to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence by mathematicians.
The ultimate goal of the AI for Math Fund is to build a digital assistant, or copilot, to help math specialists, just as these tools have aided coders, said Tom Kalil, CEO of Washington D.C.-based Renaissance Philanthropy, which is partnering with XTX to launch the fund.
That could ultimately help researchers — or the AI itself — make cutting-edge mathematical discoveries, he said in an interview on Wednesday.
While AI has made significant advances over the past few years, it’s still comparatively weak when it comes to solving very complex mathematical problems. The large language models it uses, which are trained on vast amounts of written text, tend to be biased toward linguistic rather than mathematical intelligence.
A former Deutsche Bank AG trader, Gerko built XTX Markets into one of the world’s largest algorithmic firms over 10 years. It trades more than $250 billion a day on exchanges and alternative venues and uses advanced machine learning technology to forecast prices for tens of thousands of financial instruments in asset classes including equities, fixed income, currencies and crypto.
XTX has long focused its philanthropic efforts on math and science. Last year, it set up a $10 million prize for a public AI model that can win a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
In a sign of its AI ambitions, XTX has also launched a new division for machine-learning researchers, started building a data center in Finland and amassed 25,000 graphics processing units — the chips often used in training AI models. Its teams include researchers with backgrounds in pure math, physics, computer science and machine learning.
According to Simon Coyle, XTX’s head of philanthropy, the new AI math fund has started accepting proposals that will be assessed by a panel of expert advisors that includes Terence Tao, one of the world’s leading mathematicians. Individual grants of up to $1 million will be awarded for projects lasting up to 24 months.
“Machine learning and mathematics are a big part of our firm’s DNA and in our philanthropy we want to support areas that are close to us,” Coyle said in an interview.
Renaissance Philanthropies was founded earlier this year to help high net worth individuals, families and foundations build philanthropic initiatives in science and technology.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.