Unnamed AI research lab

I am starting a research lab funded by a hedge fund that I created 5 years ago. The hedge is doing well, and applies ML to quant finance. The research and trading activities should reinforce each other over time: the research publishes research and fosters in-house ML expertise. The trading applies ML to quant finance and brings funding. The research entity is incorporated, funded, has an office and 0 employees currently. My vision for the research lab is the following: A bunch of phds in a room: create a good working environment, optimize for research output & runway. Take the 'bitter lesson' seriously: most of the successes in modern machine learning are due to deep learning and the ability to leverage vasts amounts of compute and data. I want to study how DL/LLM models reason, using ARC as a benchmark. Techniques I want to investigate include test time compute, active inference, meta-learning, self-play, or any technique that would be considered 'system 2'.