The Most Boring Guy at the AI Party

Dirty data ain't sexy

Déjà vu, Kinda

A funny thing happened just after I kicked off my last startup. The global economy melted down compliments of some Wall Street ‘Quants’ and ‘Financial Engineers’ who designed some exotic financial products based on mortgage loans. The great part about mortgage loans – according to portfolio theory - is that if you put a whole lot of them into one investment instrument there’s almost no risk because people don’t want to lose their homes, so mortgages are the last thing they default on. To improve the yield, they mixed in high risk mortgages, theorizing that it would increase returns without adding risk.  This was a product of some mathematical gymnastics compliments of the sophisticated, but opaque models provided by the talented legions of Wall Street ‘quants’. These instruments became extremely popular when a series of derivative produ…