Ben Wellington – Complex Feature Engineering at Two Sigma (S7E32)
from Flirting with Models
My guest this episode is Ben Wellington, Head of Complex Feature Engines at Two Sigma. In a modern quant process, one might argue that edge can live in three places: the data you can get your hands on, what you do with that data, and how you forecast from it. Ben lives squarely in the middle layer — feature generation — which also happens to be the place AI is reshaping fastest. So that's where we spend our time. We start with what a "feature" even is, and why, as raw data gets commoditized, the edge increasingly comes from what you build out of it. Then we follow the thread running through the whole conversation: large language models. Ben has a line I keep coming back to — that anything can be language now — and we trace what that unlocks, and whether making feature creation this cheap just democratizes the edge away. We close on what a quant starting out today should be building toward, and which skills compound most in a career where AI is the dominant tool. Please enjoy my conversation with Ben Wellington.
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