Numerai Founder Richard Craib on how Artificial Intelligence helps power his company. Faceless robots may be the next wave for investors to manage your money. Numerai, a San Francisco-based hedge fund which trades stock powered by artificial intelligence, uses data scientists to predict its market accuracy. “All of our hedge fund trades are powered by machine learning algorithms developed by people around the world and we reward them in cryptocurrency,” Numerai founder Richard Craib said during an exclusive interview with FOX Business’ Liz Claman. The San Francisco-based hedge fund says combining artificial intelligence and blockchain technology can provide an edge over traditional trading platforms. “We can have a hundred times more data scientists working on Numerai’s data than there is in competing hedge funds,” Craib said. Numerai data scientists are allowed to remain anonymous and are rewarded in bitcoin based on the investment model’s success. “By using blockchain and by paying people with cryptocurrency, we can kind of crack the crowdsourcing, get people to submit predictions that actually work,” Craib said.
Numerai claims crowdsourcing and bitcoin gives its AI-driven hedge fund an edge. The quant fund trades stocks using predictions submitted by an army of anonymous crowdsourced data scientists that are rewarded in bitcoin based on the success of the investment model they submit. The business model enables the company to work with a hundred times more data scientist than would be possible at a traditional hedge fund, according to Richard Craib, founder of the company.