Eugene Tang is the latest hedge fund quant to avoid a period of gardening leave by opting to join a tech company rather than a rival firm with a switch to artificial intelligence leader OpenAI as a "member of technical staff", according to a report by eFinancial Careers.

Having spent the past two and a half years at Citadel, most recently working as a quantitative researcher in futures and foreign exchange (FX), Tang would have faced a lengthy period of gardening leave had he joined a competitor business, when he left the multi-start last month. Instead he Was able to take up his new role at OpenAI immediately.

Before his tenure at Citadel, Tang launched his career at Two Sigma, where he joined as a graduate after interning there. At Two Sigma, he led a team focused on natural language processing (NLP). During his non-compete period after leaving Two Sigma, Tang engaged in various side projects, including developing an image-to-text model capable of generating captions for the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest and participating in his first Kaggle tournament.