Vlad Tenev - Navigating Robinhood's Evolution

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:36)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:05)
My guest today is Vlad Tenev. Vlad is the CEO and co-founder of Robinhood. It was such a treat to sit down with him and discuss the behind the scenes of a revolutionary business we all know well. He details Robinhood's journey to zero cost trading and what it means to build a consumer centric financial product. Vlad believes in finding the harmonies across mathematics and art and applies this lens to everything he builds. We discussed Robinhood's new credit card and products on the horizon, the company's toughest moments including the Gamestop episode and the compelling future of AI in financial services. Please enjoy this conversation with Vlad Tenev.
So Vlad, when we last talked, this is a strange place to start a conversation with you, probably for most people listening, but it was sure intriguing to me when we last spoke. Can you explain what mathematical super intelligence is to us?

**Vlad Tenev** (3:51)
Mathematical super intelligence is basically an artificial intelligence that can solve math problems at a superior capability to the sum total of all humans on earth. So I think there's various degrees of mathematical intelligence. And one thing I personally believe, which I think is a little bit not controversial, but I think most people don't understand this. When you say mathematical super intelligence, most people think you're building some fancy calculator that can multiply big numbers or come up with very, very large primes. And those are impressive things that computers have been better than humans at for a very long time. But really, I think the next frontier in artificial intelligence is building agents that can reason and can think like humans. And a lot of the big AI labs are talking about reasoning as sort of this next goal. And you can see the limitations of the current models with reasoning because they just make obvious mistakes and they very, very confidently say wrong things. It's particularly bad with math, but also language based logical deductions. So my belief is that mathematics is reasoning. And so when you talk about building a mathematical superintelligence, that's another way of saying something that can reason, take logical steps, make deductions, figure out itself when its own logical deductions are wrong and course correct. And really something that can think and solve problems at a level that's in excess of what humans are capable of solving. And I think the litmus test for this will be Millennium Prize problems, which are basically some of the world's most difficult unsolved problems in mathematics. And these are things like the Riemann Hypothesis, probably the most famous unsolved problem. And these are very rarely solved by humans. I was privileged to study under this professor, Paul Cohen, at Stanford, who solved one of them, one of the most famous ones, and he won a Fields Medal for it.