Ken Griffin has watched artificial intelligence compress six to eight weeks of PhD-level research into two or three hours inside Citadel. The Citadel founder and CEO now expects the same technology to strip away the advantages protecting incumbent companies and hand entrepreneurs their best window in decades. Speaking with Goldman Sachs’ Raj Mahajan at the bank’s Apex Symposium in June 2026, Griffin said the result is likely to be “a golden age of entrepreneurial activity.”
“The rough estimate is if US loses access to Taiwanese semiconductor chips, our GDP falls by 8% in six months. Simply put, we go into a great depression in the blink of an eye.”
The conversation, released last week, was the third public discussion between the two in seven years. Griffin runs Citadel, the Miami-based multi-strategy manager with roughly $68 billion in assets, alongside Citadel Securities, the market-making firm Mahajan credited with double-digit market share in equities, futures, and Treasuries. The interview ranged from AI and compute costs to China, Taiwan, energy policy, and how to hedge risks that refuse to fit a model.
Six weeks of PhD work in three hours
Mahajan opened the AI discussion by quoting Griffin back to himself: the Citadel chief had described coming home one Friday “shocked and depressed” about what AI would mean for society. Griffin supplied the use case behind the mood.
Citadel employs a legion of young masters and PhD graduates to reproduce academic finance papers, testing whether a published result, say whether stock buybacks cause stocks to outperform, holds up out of sample. The work takes “roughly six to eight weeks to reproduce a paper,” Griffin said. Then a colleague built an agentic AI system, software that plans and executes multi-step work on its own. It reads a paper, reproduces it, verifies the published results, and runs them out of sample in “on average, two to three hours per paper.”
“This is not just a white-collar job, this is a Master’s or PhD level job,” Griffin said. Mahajan added that OpenAI had just solved a math problem that had gone unsolved for 80 years.
Griffin stressed that the breakthrough has not cost anyone at Citadel a job. “There’s no reduction to headcount at Citadel on the back of this breakthrough,” he said. “I will take every single productivity gain I can get because with the talented people we have, we just have more to go after.”
Moats filled in at lightning speed
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