While the hype surrounding the launch in November last year of ChatGPT has sparked a surge in hedge fund stock market bets on the AI sector, money managers are also backing the tech to free up staff from a host of previously mundane tasks, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The vision is that so-called generative AI will allow humans to engage in more rewarding work, and already hedge funds are reportedly deploying the tech to automate and speed up reviewing market research, writing basic code and summarising fund performance.

Quants at systematic hedge fund Campbell & Co have spent months experimenting with ChatGPT to summarise internal research and write boilerplate code with the tech serving as a an "assistant to humans" to make them more efficient, according to CEO Kevin Cole.

Back in March, Citadel’s Ken Griffin said the firm is negotiating an enterprise-wide license to use ChatGPT, in the belief that it will one day automate an “enormous amount of work.”

Man Group, meanwhile, is exploring the use of ChatGPT to speed up the preliminary parts of research by detecting basic patterns in data sets, as well as automating the grunt work of investor relations.

And ChatGPT may have the potential to play a role in trading decisions too, according to academics, who have suggested it can come up with research ideas, design studies and possibly even decide what to invest in.