Welcome back to another special edition of Goldman Sachs Exchanges, great investors.

I'm Raj Mahajan, the global head of the firm's systematic client franchise in global banking and markets markets and your host for today's

episode. Today I'm delighted to be speaking with Peter Brown, CEO of Renaissance Technologies,

one of the world's most successful investment firms that pioneered a new way to invest using quantitative strategies and predictive models.

We will be discussing Peter's career, the role that machine learning and early generative language models have played in Renaissance's growth,

and how the firm has navigated through the market's most difficult and volatile periods.

Peter, it's truly a pleasure to have you on the program. Welcome.

Thanks a lot, Raj. It's a pleasure to be here.

Let's kick it off.

Peter, my understanding is that you had nothing to do with finance until age 38 and instead begin your career working on automatic speech recognition. How did that happen?

So at one point during high school, I learned about the four-year transform and I thought this was

about the coolest thing I'd ever seen probably because I went to an all-boys

school and had nothing better to contemplate anyway for some for some reason, I got into my head

that with the foray transform,

it should be possible to recognize speech.

You just take the speech data, transform it

into the frequency domain, match it up against patterns for words, and

presto magic how it would be born.

And this idea always stuck around in the back of my mind.

Then when I went to college, I majored and physics but in my senior year I had to fulfill a distribution requirement. So I took a course in linguistics and one day in the back of that course I heard a couple students talking about some guy whose name

was Steve Mosher who started a company called Dialogue Systems that was doing speech recognition

and I thought, wow, great, I remember this idea from back in high school.

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