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David Siegel

David Siegel is a computer scientist and entrepreneur known as co-founder and co-chairman of Two Sigma, the New York-based quantitative investment firm that applies machine learning and computing to financial markets [1][2][3]. He holds a PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BSE in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University, and he established Two Sigma in 2001 [1][2]. Beyond his work in finance, he has been described as a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist [3].

Siegel has traced his interest in computing to childhood, recalling that he gained access to a supercomputer at New York University at around age twelve, an opportunity he attributes partly to his mother holding a PhD in statistics and mathematics from NYU [5]. He went on to study at Princeton before pursuing graduate work at MIT, where he worked in the university's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory under adviser Tomás Lozano-Pérez, at a time when serious AI research was concentrated at only a handful of institutions such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon [5].

Before founding Two Sigma, Siegel worked at the quantitative investment firm D.E. Shaw, where he was hired by founder David Shaw, a computer scientist who Siegel says believed early on that people with computing expertise, then often regarded as secondary in society, would become central to business and technology [5]. Siegel has noted that he overlapped there with Jeff Bezos, who interviewed him for the position, an experience he points to as illustrative of the environment David Shaw built around computational thinking [5].

On the subject of artificial intelligence, Siegel has argued against the view, common among some in the field, that AI is essentially a solved problem requiring only further scaling, contending instead that intelligence involves a diverse set of capabilities that remain unevenly develop

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