Sean Gourley
Partner, Machine Capital. On 1 show, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderscientistexecutiveinvestor@sgourley ↗LinkedIn ↗primer.ai ↗
A Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford PhD in physics, Gourley researched complex systems and statistical modeling of modern insurgencies. He later co-founded the augmented intelligence platform Quid as CTO and founded the natural language processing company Primer, serving as CEO until 2023.
1shows
3appearances
33statements
16resolved
9supported
0contradicted
56%fully supported
2said about them ↓ Everything Sean Gourley said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Gourley: Information propagation in networks is central to Russian military strategy
“And it's important to know the context of where information came from, because as information is seeded into the networks, it starts to propagate, and this becomes key attack vectors that are actually unfolding, and if you listen to some of the major Russian g…”
Gourley: Algorithms can briefly wipe $1 trillion from financial markets
“Sometimes the algorithms get together and decide collectively to wipe about a trillion dollars of market capitalization off the global financial markets only to return it about 15 minutes later with nothing really happening in the world around that.”
Sean Gourley: Wikipedia has a massive recall problem despite high precision
“And this is actually not just endemic to Andre, there's nothing particularly about him, but it's actually, Wikipedia has a massive recall problem. We think a lot about its precision, and we measure its precision, but its recall is actually pretty bad when it l…”
Gourley: Machine-generated content is becoming indistinguishable from true reality
“And it's important to do this because we're living in a world, which I would term, of the generation age, where it is increasingly cheap and easy to generate a reality that is almost indistinguishable from true reality by machines.”
Gourley: Primer cut bank analyst report summary time, saving $6M
“We're able to reduce that down to about 25% of the time. And that nets out at about a six million dollar saving for that bank.”
Gourley: Graph joins on Elasticsearch slow text analysis to unusable levels
“If you try and do that on top of, like, an elastic search, you know, your joins that are going to emerge on top of the derived information are going to just slow that thing down to being unusable.”
Firms spent $300M on fiber cables cutting NY-London latency by 5ms
“Ships now laying new fiber optic cables between New York and London to show five milliseconds of round trip time at the cost of three hundred million dollars.”
A fake AP tweet about White House explosions wiped $200B
“And a fake news report from AP Newswire comes out, says there's a bomb in the White House, and then this happens. The algorithms leave the market because they go, I don't really know what's going on here. I know something to do with the bomb happened, and prob…”
Sean Gourley: 61% of internet traffic is non-human
“61% of the internet traffic is now non-human. It looks something like this. And it's increasing. Last year it was at 51%.”
Facebook's infrastructure cost $1.20 per user annually versus $13 for Google
“It costs about buck 20 to run a user on Facebook for a year. That'll vary a little bit depending on which country you're in in the world. It costs 12 bucks, 13 dollars, for a user on Google.”
Gourley predicted consumers would eventually pay subscriptions for algorithmic control
“I think we're going to see subscriptions. I think we're going to see people coming out and saying, you know what, I want a little more control of this algorithm, the information that it gives me, the friends that it chooses.”
DARPA and intelligence agencies fund automated narrative manipulation research
“The KGB's just put money into this. IAPA and DARPA have got money going into this stuff.”
Gourley: OpenAI's GPT-2 was not fact-aware
“Some of the colleagues out of OpenAI released GPT-II. That was language generation, but it wasn't fact-aware.”
Gourley: Primer headline generator achieves 84% okay-or-better rating versus 87% for humans
“So on humans, we do about 87% are okay or better. At Primer we do about 84% are okay or better.”
Gourley: Primer headlines beat human writers 29% of the time in side-by-side tests
“If we do this in a side-by-side comparison we can see around 20, 29 percent of the time primer is better and we can see around 44% of the time on the high-volume model that humans are better.”
High-frequency algorithms execute over 60% of US equity trades
“U.S. Equities market of all completed trades is now somewhere north of 60%, done by high frequency algorithms.”
Gourley: Fast financial algorithms misbehave because speed requires simplicity
“So the algorithms that we've put in place of humans, although quicker, sometimes misbehave because they're not that, that smart, and they're not that smart because they've got to be quick.”
Gourley: Knight Capital lost $440M in 45 minutes from a rogue algorithm
“The case in point of Knight Capital a couple of years ago they released an algorithm onto the market. It was never supposed to be on the market. It was an algorithm that was meant for testing. It somehow makes its way off the staging machine and into the real …”
Gourley: Algorithms that read the news will inevitably start writing it
“Now, of course, if algorithms can start to read the news, they'll, surely, they'll start writing the news.”
In 2014, Google generated $30 per user annually versus Facebook's $6
“Google makes about 30 bucks a year per user. Facebook is doing a little bit worse. They're at six dollars per user”
Quid works with PR and government clients to shape narratives
“So we work a lot of PR and marketing Drivequid to kind of shape the stories, and they try and not so much predict what the message is gonna be, but be actually the ones that are making it. And that of course has the government clients doing that stuff as well.”
Gourley: Customers pay for decision insights, not raw data
“The truth is, if you can do that well, and you can give people a better insight to billion dollar decisions, they'll pay a lot of money for it.”
Gourley: Quid hires string theorists to perform dimensionality reduction
“For us, one of the big problems is dimensionality reduction, and you want to go from a big, complex world to something that's sort of bite-sized and accessible for humans, and so we employ a lot of physicists, and particularly string theorists, because they sp…”
Gourley: Primer counts GIC, Walmart, and US intelligence agencies as customers
“We've got some major customers that we can talk about, some that we can't but GIC is the biggest sovereign wealth fund out of Singapore. Walmart, obviously half a trillion of revenue, and also through our partnerships within Qtel we're deployed into a large nu…”
The other half of the tape: Sean Gourley's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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the MAD Podcast 2
2013 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Sean's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MADLEDGER | Partner, Machine Capital | 3 | 33 | 56% 9/16 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |