Goku Technologies, a Shanghai-based trading firm, is now setting its sights beyond just making money in finance. The company is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help tackle big problems facing humanity, according to CEO Wang Xiao.
In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Wang said their AI work isn’t just about short-term profits. “I believe AI should be used to solve real problems for people — that’s what truly matters,” he explained.
To support this mission, Goku recently launched a new AI-focused company called Shanghai AllMind Artificial Intelligence Technology. This move is similar to what another Chinese hedge fund, High-Flyer Quant, has done as it also expands into the AI space.
However, Wang said that Goku’s approach is different and shouldn’t be directly compared to others.
He explained that AllMind isn’t trying to compete with big tech companies like Alibaba or start-ups like DeepSeek, which build their own AI models from the ground up. Instead, AllMind’s goal is to use AI to help with scientific research and discovery, acting as a tool to speed up progress in science.
Last month, Goku Technologies made headlines by releasing a research paper about a new AI training method. This method combines two key techniques—supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning—which are also used by top AI companies like OpenAI and DeepSeek.
In the paper, researchers from Goku and its AI arm, AllMind, said their method performed better than the common techniques used by leading AI labs.
The research was done together with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and submitted to the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), often called the “AI Olympics.” This was the first time a Chinese quant trading firm took part in this major international AI event, which features top experts in machine learning from around the world.
Wang said that AllMind is expected to cost about 50 million yuan (US$7 million) a year to run. Right now, it’s fully funded by Goku Technologies, which is one of China’s largest quantitative trading firms, managing over 15 billion yuan in assets last year. However, Wang mentioned they might look for outside investors in the future.
Goku’s strong focus on AI isn’t something new or sudden. The company set up its own AI team in 2017, just two years after it was founded in 2015, to explore how AI and algorithms could improve trading.
While companies like OpenAI, Alibaba, and DeepSeek are known for AI products that interact with everyday users—like chatbots—Goku has chosen to focus more on AI research and behind-the-scenes development.
Researchers at Goku and AllMind focus on core AI model research, looking at how this technology can be used not only in quantitative trading but also in other areas beyond finance.
“I told my team that to use [AI models] well, we need to understand them inside and out, so we began working on topic-based fundamental research,” he said, referring to the company’s joint work with Shanghai Jiao Tong University on model training.
Through their work, the team found that the AI system they built to handle financial data could also be used for research in other fields—like new materials, chemistry, and biology.
“After we completed that research, our next step would be to use AI for science,” Wang said.
Wang, who holds a doctorate in physics from Shanghai’s Fudan University, serves as CEO for both Goku and AllMind. He said the lines between the two roles had blurred as his daily activities revolved largely around discussions with engineers about AI models.
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