(Yicai Global) April 17 -- The managing director of High-Flyer Quant said the Chinese quantitative hedge fund's plan to explore the essence of artificial general intelligence does not include the option to use AGI for stock trading.

“Let me reiterate: AGI will not be used for trading stocks,” Lu Zhengzhe said in a post on his WeChat Moments yesterday, noting that “AGI is much more useful and valuable.”

After High-Flyer released a statement on April 14 saying that the Hangzhou-based fund will focus its resources to form a new independent research body to “explore the essence of AGI,” market rumors that High-Flyer will use AI to trade stocks started circulating online. Some even claimed that its fund managers would soon lose their jobs.

“What we actually intend to do is a totally independent research of large models, and it has nothing to do with finance,” a source at High-Flyer told Yicai Global. “What we care about is long-term social value.”

Founded in 2015, High-Flyer manages over CNY60 billion (USD8.7 billion) of funds. According to its statement on April 14, the company has been spending most of its revenue on AI over the years and has built leading AI hardware infrastructure and carried out large-scale research.

Some institutional investors have already begun to use ChatGPT for market analysis, although such technology cannot completely replace fund managers and quantitative analysts, finance industry professionals said after High-Flyer denied its AI research is aimed at stock trading.

ChatGPT can help increase the research and development efficiency of fund researchers because with ChatGPT, the researcher only needs to input some related information, and the program will retrieve the required data, a private equity fund manager told Yicai Global.

But using machines to build neural networks is still not quite feasible with existing technologies because we still rely on human thinking to build quantitative trading models, as ChatGPT can imitate but not innovate by itself, the fund manager noted.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione