The most generous employer in Abu Dhabi is building an AI lab too. This is the only issue

Building an AI lab is important now. If you have an AI lab, you can attract AI talent. If you can attract AI talent, anything might happen. Qube is building an AI lab. So is Optiver.

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So too is ADIA, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. ADIA already has ADIA Lab, in which Marcos López de Prado, the global head of quantitative R&D is a significant figure. Within ADIA Lab, it’s now building out a team focused on “Trustworthy AI” according to current job advertisements for a team leader. 

ADIA declined to comment for this article, but there are well known reasons for working there. The salaries it pays are through the roof, with senior people receiving $5m+ in fixed pay alone, tax free. In the lab itself, the work is rarefied and academic, with a broad focus not just on investing, but on climate science, healthcare and materials. 

All of this sounds really great, but insiders at ADIA tell us that careers there can also get stuck. This is partly because the salaries are so high and so tax free that it’s impossible to find anything comparable elsewhere. 

There are also suggestions that it can be difficult to leave ADIA for other employers, particularly hedge funds, as many funds have ADIA as a client, and don’t want to upset it. And in many roles (although this is nothing unusual), you leave ADIA without a verified track record. 

“People get stuck,” says one ADIA insider. “It can be easier to move into an asset management firm, but many see this as a step backwards. Many hedge funds won’t touch you.”

A recruiter in the region says a job at ADIA can be a bit like a golden cage and that people can end up stuck there. “If you’re good, you can get paid more at a multistrategy hedge fund,” he says. “But that move can be hard.”

None of this may matter to people joining ADIA’s new AI lab, particularly if they’re focused on the use of AI in healthcare applications rather than finance. But it’s possibly worth considering if you hope to work on an AI investing tool. 

It’s equally worth observing that it’s not completely unheard of for ADIA people to leave for hedge funds. We observed various exits earlier this year. Andrei Chertok, a former quant researcher at ADIA is now head of AI X12 Capital, a commodities hedge fund in Abu Dhabi after leaving in 2023.  

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