Kah Hong T

Kah Hong T

Quantitative Research and Machine Learning

Competition as Validation

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Peter Thiel: Competition as Validation. It may be tempting to squeeze through the narrow door that everyone is trying to get into, but take a step back and instead look around the corner and explore the vast, empty gate that no one is paying attention to. It is unthinkable that in many perceivably esteemed career paths the degree of competition has become so fierce when the stakes are so low. The intention is not to insinuate a lifestyle lacking in competition, and thus lacking in ambition. While thriving to succeed in a highly competitive space may indicate some level of ambition, the reverse is not true.

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Focus on Building

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Took a breather from the myriad changes happening the last few weeks. This year has been eventful indeed. Some principles to follow as I pursue a more definitely uncertain, indefinitely successful and infinitely interesting future.

OpenAI Reasoning Model o1

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OpenAI just released the o1 model that is focused on reasoning capabilities, generally substituting immediate next token generation with some reasoning steps introduced before some delayed token generation. This represents a significant 0-1 step-up in LLM capabilities, immediately surpassing beyond Gemini, Claude and other open-sourced models like Llama3 in mathematical and scientific reasoning. Most likely, this model does not represent a foundational model improvement, but rather entails introducing an orchestration layer informed by chain-of-thought reasoning, self-reflection and reinforcement learning. As opposed to zero-shot prompting using the base pretrained model, this means perhaps a factor more number of inference calls for each request. This has interesting implications on the output token cost structures of using AI models with reasoning.

AI Financial Analyst?

3 minute read

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I have recently read several articles echoing a similar sentiment: due to the limitations of artificial intelligence, AI will not replace traditional financial analysts anytime soon. One author suggests that human intelligence is still decades ahead of AI in automated fundamental investing. However, despite the confidence seemingly portrayed in these articles, the rationales and empirical evidence provided to support this notion have been weak.

Action and Conviction

4 minute read

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Learnt an inspirational quote from Sam Altman today: Inaction is an insiduous form of risk. Only by moving forward can we see and explore the wide universe of opportunities ahead. Have found myself starting to appreciate the complexity of risk management in personal or career decision making; a state of action or inaction both involves accepting a level of risk, and have therefore decided to restructure the problem into 2 concepts: Action and Conviction.