Weekly · Machine learning & quantitative finance

The Weekly
Frontier

The most important ideas, research and developments across machine learning and quantitative finance.

Why I write this

Every week I have hundreds of conversations with people working at the edge of machine learning and quantitative finance, and I spend hours digging into the research, papers and announcements behind them. Most of what I learn never makes it past those conversations. The Weekly Frontier is my way of giving something back to this community: the ideas and developments that matter most, distilled into one considered read each week.

— Freddie Fulton

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This week's edition · Week ending 25 October 2026 19 – 25 Oct 2026

My top 5 market insights from last week in the quant and ML/AI worlds:

  1. Two labs caught their own agents misbehaving in the same week (OpenAI & Anthropic).
  2. Citadel cuts internal research tasks from 6-8 weeks to just 2-3 hours, using AI.
  3. Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a $6B valuation, backed by Jump Trading & XTX Ventures.
  4. New quant benchmark puts 9 frontier AI models to the test. None beat the market.
  5. Quant firms are building huge GPU stacks, with XTX now running 25,000+ GPUs.

That's just a sneak peek. The full edition goes much deeper across 10 sections, from the week's most important research papers to what's moving in quant, Big Tech and academia.

Read this week's edition →

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All editions

No. 4 19 – 25 Oct 2026 Read →
  1. Two labs caught their own agents misbehaving in the same week (OpenAI & Anthropic).
  2. Citadel cuts internal research tasks from 6-8 weeks to just 2-3 hours, using AI.
  3. Flapping Airplanes raises $1B at a $6B valuation, backed by Jump Trading & XTX Ventures.
  4. New quant benchmark puts 9 frontier AI models to the test. None beat the market.
  5. Quant firms are building huge GPU stacks, with XTX now running 25,000+ GPUs.
 No. 3 12 – 18 Oct 2026 Read →
  1. The FBI arrests an OpenAI engineer accused of planting a recording device to access confidential AI research & business plans.
  2. Google launches Gemini 4 Argon with aggressive API pricing, adding more pressure to the frontier AI race.
  3. Jump Trading hires the entire founding team of Itô Markets to build a desk trading AI compute. Compute is becoming a market of its own.
  4. Jane St shares details of its Flex Model, with one test showing a 25% reduction in tail latency.
  5. Eight US states sue OpenAI over alleged harm caused by ChatGPT, calling for self-improving models to be blocked until alignment can be demonstrated.
 No. 2 5 – 11 Oct 2026 Read →
  1. Meta lets go of its entire Virtue AI safety team, just 4 months after acquiring it.
  2. Anthropic AI agent gave police fake tip about unsolved murder case, showing what can go wrong when AI agents act in the real world.
  3. WorldQuant's quant research competition nearly doubles in registrations to around 156,000, showing how AI is opening up quantitative research to a much wider pool of people.
  4. OpenAI's reported revenue shortfall sends AI chip stocks lower for 4 straight sessions. Is AI spending getting ahead of the revenue?
  5. XTX Markets founder Alex Gerko makes the UK Rich List at #8 with a £16bn fortune, built through an AI-driven trading firm with around 250 people.
 No. 1 28 Sep – 4 Oct 2026 Read →
  1. The race for frontier AI talent in the quant world continues as Citadel names Google DeepMind as a direct recruiting target.
  2. Anthropic pursues a $2 trillion IPO on a $518bn compute commitment.
  3. OpenAI lead researcher resigns due to ‘broken culture’ as its safety function implodes.
  4. Meta Superintelligence Labs make progress on open maths problems using AI, showing how important maths is becoming in frontier AI.
  5. GPT-6 Astra scores 62.7% vs 98.6–99.9% on the same benchmark depending on the testing set-up, raising questions over AI benchmark results.