More broadly, money flowing out of the hedge fund industry as a whole comes at a time when performance has been disappointing. The Hedge Fund Research Composite Index, the broadest gauge of hedge fund performance, has lagged the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index this year, gaining 3.56 percent through the end of October compared with the index’s 4 percent gain over the same period, accounting for reinvested dividends.

“Frankly, we expect to see assets move from human managers to machine managers,” Tony James, chief operating officer of Blackstone, told investors earlier this year. The Blackstone Alternative Asset Management arm, which manages $70 billion in hedge fund investments, is a big investor in quant-related hedge fund firms and has put billions of dollars toward these firms in recent years. The division now has $10 billion invested in quant-dedicated hedge fund firms, according to one person with direct knowledge of the firm; it has not publicly released the number.

Some industry observers warn that hedge funds building out new quant arms may simply be trying to capture investor money that is flowing into the strategy. But veterans in the quant world see the trend as an indication that the industry is finally catching up to other industries in which technology has disrupted businesses.

“The portfolio investment industry has been relatively late to adopting technology,” said Philippe Jordan, the president of Capital Fund Management, a 25-year-old quant hedge fund firm that manages $6.9 billion. “Finance is deeply conservative in nature,” he added.

Capital Fund Management has 160 employees, including 40 scientists, most of whom hold Ph.D.s in physics; 75 employees are focused on information technology, 20 of which are in data management. Like other types of hedge funds, the firm has a research department. The only difference is that at Capital Fund Management, the analysts who conduct research approach the work more like academics, and ideas are peer-reviewed.

With more investor money going toward firms that build models to trade on, there is some concern that these models will begin to look similar, potentially resulting in overcrowding. That could be a problem if there is a sudden event that drives everyone to start selling at the same time, something that happened during the “quant crunch” in the summer of 2007. Over one week in August, AQR Capital Management, D. E. Shaw and Renaissance Technologies were all hit with huge losses as the housing market began to show signs of collapse. With similar models and huge positions, the losses each firm suffered were amplified.

Mr. Shen at BlackRock thinks there are fewer risks this time around. “The diversity of data allows people to do a lot of different things,” he said.