There is quantitative and there is quantitative. My firm is fully quant/process driven. A seperate team that I hired is pure artificial intelligence and machine learning - today is their last day. I backed 5 world class practitioners and gave them free rein, three years and ..

... anything they needed.
We tried to analyse why they just couldn’t predict
1. They couldn’t accept or prove to their satisfaction that the future distribution of returns is guaranteed to change.
2. They wanted the algorithms to find their strategies rather than applying...

.... experience and domain knowledge with first principles research.
3. They couldn’t accept that a strategy must accept BOTH momentum and reversionary outcomes of future price movement.
4. They were too reliant on their own precious published work rather than alpha research

5. At its core - some of their work was absolutely outstanding for phenomena that exhibit PERMANENTLY stable distributions, but for scenarios where it is possible/ likely that the fourth moment may/ does diverge - no good. All going to an engineering firm.