In late January, Mark Higgins, the retired co-founder of fintech company Beacon Platforms and former co-head of quant research at JP Morgan, set out to solve an options-pricing problem that had bugged him for much of his career.

The nature of the problem – which concerns how correlations between currency spot prices and volatility behave differently from how they’re usually modelled – matters less here than how Higgins solved it. He used a combination of two large language models.

I’m good at this