The AI industry has matured a lot in recent years as the major labs expand and new rivals emerge. A recent entrant is the overweeningly named ‘Project Prometheus,’ a lab quietly launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos last year. It recently made headlines for poaching xAI co-founder Kyle Kosic, but has also adopted OpenAI‘s habit of looking to financial services for talent.
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This week, Andrei Margeloiu announced he was joining Prometheus in London. He spent the last year and a half working on FX quant research and development for hedge fund Citadel, which he joined after completing a PhD from Cambridge. His PhD thesis focused on using neural networks to analyze data.
It appears to be the first direct hire from a financial services firm, but Prometheus has also pursued multiple people that had already left finance for AI. Late last year, it hired San Francisco-based Shiyuan Guo; he spent two and a half years as a FICC/equities quant at Citadel Securities, but left for Claude developer Anthropic last March. In February it hired London-based Jamie Watson. He’d spent the last seven years at Niantic (the video game development/AR firm behind Pokemon Go) but previously worked as a structured credit trader for Morgan Stanley, whom he joined as a PhD graduate.
There may be more finance alums, but Prometheus employees are extremely secretive. The FT reported this week that it has hundreds of staff, but less than 80 people on LinkedIn say they’re associated with the project.
Other AI labs have been hiring finance alums too in 2026. xAI hired London-based Daniel Pfeifer from electronic trading firm Optiver (which is launching its own AI lab) last month. In January, it hired New York-based Depei Li who spent the last two years as a quant trader at Jane Street spinoff Five Rings Capital. LinkedIn suggests that over 150 people from hedge fund/trading firms have joined Anthropic or OpenAI within the past year alone.
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