The ex-Goldman Sachs macro MD with an alternative method of making money
Enrico Ottavian has what is known as pedigree. He studied at Bocconi, where all the best Italians go. He did a Masters in Financial Economics at Warwick, which is nearly as good as Imperial. He went to Goldman Sachs and became a managing director in macro structuring there in 2014.
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With this pedigree, Ottavian could probably have joined a big hedge fund. He didn't. Since leaving Goldman Sachs' London office in 2019 he has run Deep Grey Research, a self-described "technology company applying artificial intelligence to financial markets." Now he's embarking on something else - he's setting up an exchange to trade AI intelligence.
"In a few months from now, whether we like it or not, AI will trade as a commodity," says Ottavian. "There will be a new market for AI intelligence, where people can trade LLM tokens like electricity or oil and we plan to be the first to provide liquidity in it."
Ottavian isn't the only person preparing to trade elements of the AI market. Ex-Citi vice president (VP) Carmen Li runs Compute Exchange, an exchange created by DRW founder Don Wilson to trade GPUs.
Ottavian says his exchange, "AskTilly" will be different. "This is not trading the hardware. It's trading the use of the model."
To trade use of the model, it's first necessary to understand that you're getting use of the model you've paid for, and not a cheaper alternative. Anthropic said this week that it plans to embed invisible watermarks in the text generated by its models. Ottavian is using a verification protocol at TensorCash.
If all this work pays off, Ottavian could end up with a payday larger than those on offer at Millennium. OpenRouter, another site offering switching between different AI models was recently valued at $1.3bn. Ottavian says OpenRouter is comparatively crude: "You choose a model and when you open the model it tells you that seven people will give it to you and its price." AskTilly adds a verification layer. "It's going to be revolutionary," he says.
Ottavian isn't the only person to see a future in trading AI model access. Alan Chang, the man who made millions at Revolut and left again aged 28, wrote recently that dynamic token pricing is the next frontier as prices flex according to location, time of day and willingness to wait for a response. "Prices that vary by time and place inevitably lead to spot markets, futures, and hedging," said Chang. He predicted the big AI labs will trade model access. An ex-Goldman macro guy has a different idea.
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