The nation's largest bank is also an adorably lame wannabe early adopter dad who "just loves tech" so it came as something less than a surprise to learn that JPMorgan went and pulled 'An Uber' in a bold move to bolster it's machine learning division...

The largest U.S. bank by assets said Thursday that Carnegie Mellon University’s head of machine learning will join JPMorgan in a new role, head of artificial-intelligence research.
In the position, Manuela Veloso, who is also a professor at Carnegie Mellon, will build on the bank’s existing work applying machine learning technology, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

AI is a big deal for the big banks and will go a long way to streamlining processes (in combo with Jamie Dimon's newly-beloved Blockchain) and cost management (ie automation-induced mass layoffs.) Hiring a big academic name is a nice way to show serious engineers that you're in this for real, but it's hardly a magic bullet. For proof of that negative, let's just gaze and behold the fleet of perfectly operational self-driving cars that Uber has on America's roads after poaching most of Carnegie Mellon's robotics department.

[Insert .gif of tumbleweeds here]

While we look forward to seeing what Veloso does at JPM [the smart money is discovering a way to implant Dimon's consciousness into Marianne Lake's cerebral cortex], we don't expect things to happen very fast. But at least we know what this old picture is all about:

JPMorgan Taps Carnegie Mellon Professor for New Artificial Intelligence Role [WSJ]