Vlad Novakovski

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600 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 27 Jul

Vlad Novakovski’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Bankless · From Harvard at 18 to Building Crypto's Fastest Exchange | Vlad, Lighter · 27 Jul 2026 podcast

But what's interesting is like that competition,

Back then, I think now these Olympiads have become more famous because of, you know, success of some people who've done them.

But like back then, this research competition was considered like the main science competition in the US.

And we got to meet the president, the vice president, a bunch of Nobel laureates.

And...

the Nobel laureates you know and they were I think expressing the opinion of the scientific community at the time they were like yeah all this like machine learning stuff like that's a dead end like you like it's kind of it's cute that you did this work as a kid but like if you want to do science like do quantum like this neural network stuff is not going to work wow and so yeah did you did you have a reaction to that when they said that yeah I mean I at the time I mean I was like who am I I was like yeah like

Let's focus more on the quantum stuff, sure.

I did move away from it, and then I came back to it 12 years after, kind of in my role at Quora.

Because big data, I guess the big data kind of changed the game.

Because I think, I mean, they weren't wrong what they were saying, given what existed at the time, because this was pre-internet scale data.

Right.

Well, the machine learning, you know, we were using it in quant finance too.

Because after 2008...

like before that you could trade in fairly simple ways and it was more around implementing like fast execution you know what's now known as high frequency trading right but like pretty simple strategies worked then after 2008 those simple strategies stopped working and you had to find more complicated patterns in the market so machine learning was used for that too it just wasn't see the differences like in in the tech industry if you come up with anything interesting you want to like create buzz around it and all that

in quant trading it's the opposite right like you don't like if you actually have really interesting math model to trade yeah you keep a secret and you want the competitors to think that you're doing something very basic even if you're not right right so like so we were using a lot of this machine learning stuff whether it's my team or other teams at my firm or our competitors like we're using a lot of this stuff so i knew some of that already including from like the work i did as a kid but like

Yeah, with Quora, you know, the internet companies, we certainly weren't the only ones to do it.

I mean, Spotify was matching users and music recommendations.

The guy who worked on that is another kid I knew from Olympiads.

Now he's running a company called Modal.

You know, the Netflix, you know, if you recall, there was a Netflix prize back in 2010.

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