Griffin’s Doors
Inside Citadel’s Talent Machine
“My job is to manufacture money.” — Ken Griffin
I haven’t had a chance to visit Citadel’s new global headquarters in Miami, and it’s a while since I visited the firm’s offices in New York, but I’m told that on his elevator doors, CEO Ken Griffin has emblazoned a slogan informing all who enter that his is the “#1 Most Profitable Hedge Fund Manager of All Time.”
The message celebrates Citadel’s position atop LCH Investments’ rolling scoreboard of hedge fund gains. Since founding the firm in 1990, Griffin has delivered net gains to investors of $90.4 billion after fees – over $10 billion more than any of his closest peers. His flagship fund has generated positive returns in more than 80% of the months it has been going, and has grown at a rate of 19.2% a year, again after fees. With $68 billion under management, Citadel isn’t the largest hedge fund manager out there but it is adept at managing cycles and the changes they bring.
Recently, Griffin has been speaking about AI. The finance industry has a long tradition of deploying technology to achieve edge, and Citadel has been at the forefront. It launched a quantitative strategies group in 2012 and employs around 270 PhDs from fields including computer engineering and statistics. Currently, around one in three employees at the firm is a software engineer.1
Yet while the firm was quick to embrace earlier machine learning advances to support its portfolio managers, its approach to generative AI was more tempered. Griffin instructed his team to abandon 195 of the 200 projects they had been working on and a year ago remarked that AI hadn’t been game-changing. As recently as January, he remained unimpressed:
“I was with one of my colleagues who runs our commodities business, and he handed me a report that we generated with an AI engine. Doesn’t matter what the topic was, the first few sentences – wow, that’s really insightful. And then you go down below that and it’s all garbage.”
At a session at Stanford this month, though, he changed his tune.
“In the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago.
And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with Masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.
… I have to tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it’s like, wow, like that’s the first time I’ve seen real impact in our four walls.”
Griffin’s experience reflects a prediction made by Anthropic, the AI lab most focused on finance. In a report on the labor market, it ranks investment analysts as the seventh most exposed profession to AI displacement, up there with data entry keyers and customer service representatives. For a firm built around people – “a culture where talent can thrive,” as Citadel’s website proclaims, and “a team where every mind counts” – this can be jarring.2
To find out how Griffin has built one of the most disciplined talent operations in finance – and whether AI changes the calculus – read on.