Page 73 - Forbes - India (January 2020)

equbot

they power the computer centres
The world’s fastest computer that Amazon rents out to EquBot
No computer exhibits artificial and other AI researchers.
intelligence unless it can think Last year EquBot’s software
quickly. Here’s a time line of the picked up a buzz around Amarin
fastest—the earliest of which Corp, an Irish drug company with a
would have been smoked by
any smartphone—with speeds prescription-only diet supplement
measured in billions of floating that uses omega-3 fatty acids. The
point operations per second. international ETF got in below $3,
well before the regulatory nod that
1964 1974 1985 1996 2018 sent the stock to $15. Another move
CDC 6600 Star-100 Cray 2 Hitachi SR2201 iPhone 11 Pro IBM Summit involved adding Visa to the domestic
Control Data Control Data Cray Hitachi Apple IBM
(US) (US) (US) (Japan) (US) (US) fund after the system measured
0.003 GFLOP 0.1 GFLOP 0.9 GFLOP 600 GFLOP 600 GFLOP 149M GFLOP ripples leading from announcements
of chain-store closings toward
Put that kind of artificial in Bengaluru, India. The system higher credit card volume.
intelligence (AI) to work and it swallows 1.3 million texts a day: The computer has its share of
could do a lot more than win TV news, blogs, social media, SEC filings. duds. It fell in love with NetApp
game shows. It might function IBM’s Watson system digests the and New Relic, perhaps reacting
as a physician’s assistant, as language, picking up facts to feed into to a flurry of excitement in cloud
a recommender of products a knowledge graph of a million nodes. computing. The stocks sank. Not
to consumers or as a detector Each of those dots to be connected to worry, says Khatua. Neural
of credit card fraud. Maybe it could be a company (one of 15,000), a networks learn from mistakes.
could manage portfolios. keyword (like “FDA”) or an economic It’s too early to say whether
Khatua, now 44, enlisted two factor (like the price of oil). There EquBot, which manages only $120
B-school classmates in his venture. are a trillion potential arrows to link million, will succeed. So far its US 73
Arthur Amador, 35, had spent much them. After trial and error inside a fund has lagged behind the S&P
of his career at Fidelity Investments neural network, which mimics the 500 by an annualised 3 percentage
advising wealthy families. neuronal connections in a brain, the points, while the international one is
Christopher Natividad, 37, was a computer weights the few arrows running 6 points ahead of its index.
money manager for corporations. that matter. Thus does the system EquBot, which says its funds are
They didn’t have any illusions that grope its way toward knowing which the only actively managed ETFs using
a computer would have understanding ripples in input data are felt a week, a AI, won’t have this turf to itself for
the way humans do. But it could have month or a year later, in stock prices. long. IBM is selling AI up and down
knowledge. It could glean facts—a On a busy day EquBot is doing Wall Street. Donna Dillenberger,
mountain of them—and search for half a quadrillion calculations. Thank an IBM scientist in Yorktown
patterns and trends in the securities goodness for Nvidia’s graphics Heights, New York, is working on
markets. Perhaps it could make up in chips. These slivers of silicon were a stock market model with millions
brute force what it lacked in intuition. designed to keep gamers happy of nodes, and she says billion-node
The trio chipped in savings of by simultaneously processing systems are around the corner.
their own and $735,000 from angel different pieces of a moving image. An equally large threat comes from
investors to create EquBot, advisor to They turned out to be ideal for the those human analysts Khatua is trying
exchange-traded funds. IBM, eager intensely parallel computational to put out of work. They can track
to showcase its AI offerings, gave streams of neural networks, and drug trials or notice that Amazon
the entrepreneurs a $120,000 credit doesn’t take cash. What EquBot
toward software and hardware bills. has in its favour is the explosion
Two years ago EquBot opened in digitised data and a comparable
up AI Powered Equity ETF, with a On a busy day growth in chip power. Humans can’t
portfolio updated daily on instruction EquBot is doing keep up with all the connections.
from computers. In 2018 it added half a quadrillion “Ninety percent of the data in
AI Powered International Equity. existence was created in the past two
Chief Executive Khatua presides calculations years,” says Art Amador, EquBot’s
over a tiny staff in San Francisco and chief operating officer. “In two
17 programmers and statisticians years that will still be true.”

january 31, 2020 • forBEs india