Citadel employs a large group of young master's and PhD graduates whose job is to reproduce academic finance papers and see whether the published results hold up with fresh data. That work, CEO Ken Griffin said, takes "roughly six to eight weeks to reproduce a paper." A colleague at the firm then built an agentic AI system that reads the paper, reproduces it, verifies the results, and runs them out of sample, in what Griffin put at "on average, two to three hours per paper."
Griffin, who founded Citadel and runs it alongside the market maker Citadel Securities, described the system in conversation with Goldman Sachs' (GS) Raj Mahajan at the bank's Apex Symposium in June 2026. The recording was released in July. It was the third public conversation between the two men in seven years, and the AI section came first.
