"AI" is not a single thing. There are some projects that you train to respond to signals, sure. Some of them are already in use in HFT. Modern trading tends to use a lot more inputs than just the historic price though - you also look at wire services, twitter, etc. So I wouldn't expect this to be competitive without having access to more data.
Wasn't the point that the rats only reacted the the live feed, and didn't have any ancillary data? That ticker tracks converted to sound were enough to perform strikingly well in terms of deciding holding moves?
...the training was almost finished; the performances of the top 4 rats had turned out to be comparable to those of the world' s best fund managers. Their ability to recognize sound patterns generated from the market's ticker tape was incredible. And the rat traders also hold another advantage: unlike their human counterparts, they are not likely to be distracted from news or economy fundamentals, their own personal or their bank's financial status.
I should point out that it's not at all surprising that the "top 4" rats performed very well. If you got a couple of hundred people, animals, or random number generators to trade using any set of rules you like, and then looked at the top 4, you would almost always find that they outperform, because that's what being in the top 4 means!
The real question is whether the same four rats would be the outperformers if you ran the experiment again.
