Hedge fund Balyasny hired the CIA's chief AI data scientist

Hedge fund Balyasny's AI team has made big hires in the past from major AI talent hubs, particularly Google and its Deepmind subsidiary. The latest AI specialist to join the firm comes from somewhere altogether different.

Matthew Henderey has joined Balyasny as a director of data science, based in Virginia. He spent the last 12 years in Washington as a technologist in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The bulk of his time there was spent as a data scientist in its cyber intelligence division but, for the last four years, Henderey has been the chief data scientist for the CIA's office of artificial intelligence.

In the role, Henderey said he led the buildout of a platform allowing engineering and technology staff in the agency to have access to AI services. He also made the top AI models available in the "top-secret cloud for the entire Intelligence Community."

It's not Henderey's first foray into finance. A few years after graduating as a PhD physicist, he founded Zephyr Financial, an automated trading firm, where he worked as a quantitative analyst. That lasted just 15 months though, as he went on to work for research management firm SRA International where he would analyze everything from Iraq war battlefield data to clinical research data related to arthritis and rheumatism. 

Henderey doesn't provide much detail on is work in the CIA's cyber intelligence division, but he said that his work "transformed mission workflows." The rest is presumably above all our clearance levels.

It's not clear whether he will be working in Balaysny's applied AI organization, led by ex-Google data scientist Charlie Flanagan. Its marquee product is BAMChatGPT, a specialised AI chatbot for its traders and staff, and its total suite of tools are used by 80% of the fund's staff. 

Balyasny declined to comment.

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