Where do hedge funds/investment banks get their artificial intelligence programs?

Most build their own, don’t expect to buy off-the-shelf systems unless you are referring to basic frameworks that AI is built on.

The brainwork of the machine learning/AI are closely guarded IP (intellectual property) from hedge funds and investment banks. These projects take tens of millions of dollars (sometimes hundreds of millions like Bridgewater) worth of R&D (research and development) and have millions and millions of lines of code. TEAMS of data scientists work on segments of the overall codebase to prevent a single person from having access to all of the codebase — if they decide to defect to a competitor and walk off with company IP — legal action soon to follow.

My experience is that certain strategies become less effective the more they are used, so HF’s and IB’s aren’t willing to sell their IP (unless it’s discontinued or replaced with newer technology) — otherwise they are essentially creating their own competition using their own ideas.

Hope that helps.