Machine learning vs. robust backtesting strategies

I'm pretty sure that none of the AI models that have been written about in the literature and that the quant hedge funds employ use ranking. If I'm wrong, maybe someone who knows more about this than I do can set me straight. So if you read some papers about AI models in stockpicking, maybe you'll get a sense of how they work. It's opaque to me, but I haven't investigated it much.

I gave P123's AI a shot a few weeks ago but I had trouble with it. I'm sure I was doing something wrong or something I wanted hadn't been developed yet. I'm looking forward to trying it again very soon.