On November 3 in New York, I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion, "The New Moats - Building the Quant Stack for a GenAI Era", at the 7th Annual Beryl Elites Alternative Investment, Technology and Innovation - Thought Leadership Conference.

We zoomed in on the question of a true moat in investment management with the deployments of LLMs: if everyone has access to (or can buy) the same data and models, what's there beyond the 'new table stakes' and operational efficiency vs a temporary advantage and a sustainable edge?

"The New Moats - Building the Quant Stack for a GenAI Era"

Moderator:
Robert Ciemniak, Founder & CEO, Robotic Online Intelligence (ROI)

Panellists:
Daniel ('Dr. Dan') Sandberg, PhD, CFA, Managing Director, S&P Global
Spenser Marshall, Chief Information Officer, M Science
Ehsan Ehsani, Executive Director, Crescendo Partners LP Partners
Mike Soss, Chief Investment Officer, Millburn

📝 One broader point from the discussion: one needs to be realistic about what the LLMs are / what they can do, especially in the investment management use cases with high accuracy requirements; but within these constraints, there is still plenty of excitement and a lot more that can be done; the moat then lies in unique deployments, integration, proprietary data/semantic layer, and ultimately the people factor; LLM can be important, but it's just one of the components.

🤖 In the spirit of that session, I also ran some 'deep research' on each panellist as to what they would likely talk about given their past speaking engagements and publications, along with an LLM-generated prediction as to what the conclusion of the panel would be (i.e. before the panel). What came back on the latter was around 68% 'there' (and we didn't cover the last point), interesting in itself:

📝 Moats come from proprietary unstructured-data pipelines, domain ontologies, and RAG.

📝 Human-in-the-loop beats automation; interpretability and model-risk controls are mandatory.

📝 Quant migration to private markets needs alt-data, precise retrieval, rigorous validation.

A big thank you to Vidak Radonjic and hashtag#berylelites for hosting another great event. A thought-provoking 'contrarian' opening talk by Nouriel Roubini was particularly intriguing, along with the eye-opening session on biotech.