When money talks, AI should listen
Billions of dollars floating into AI are elevating the noise to a level which drowns any signal.
Here are two articles which one should pay attention to.
The first one is from OpenAI, the poster child of a rudderless company, desperately trying to justify its existence with the introduction of another product — A new personal finance experience in ChatGPT (all while trying to seduce startups with a wad of free tokens in exchange for equity.)
From the OpenAI post we learn that “you can securely connect your financial accounts, see a dashboard of where your money is going, and ask ChatGPT questions grounded in your financial context — all while staying in control of your data.”
And we also learn that “more than 200 million people come to ChatGPT every month for budgeting, questions about their investments, comparing different paths, planning for future goals, and more.”
With this new product, what kind of questions would you be able to ask — and hopefully get an answer to
These are the questions as suggested by the marketing team:
“I feel like I’ve been spending more recently. Has anything changed?”
“Can I afford to take a lower paying job if it gives me more flexibility to be home with the kids?”
“What’s the biggest risk in my portfolio?”
I think you found a soulmate in ChatGPT when you confess to it about your feelings and runaway finances. Or maybe that’s the wild imagination of marketing people.
But it gets better. In the next section labeled “How to get started,” you learn that you connect all your bank/financial accounts and ChatGPT starts ‘synchronizing’ them. The synchronization means that every single piece of your banking information is downloaded to ChatGPT. Every spend, every transaction — on an ongoing basis — will be willingly provided by you to OpenAI. What could possibly go wrong!!
First you tell ChatGPT all your personal problems, then you share your finances and then you see ads for things which you really, really need to get. Part of the demo is a use case when ChatGPT provides suggestions for how to rebalance your portfolio. That information is provided to people who ask — “I feel like I’ve been spending more recently. Has anything changed?”
However, AI is not only for the masses, big banks are using it as well. In the recent interview, the ex-CEO and chairman of Goldman Sachs described how the bank is using AI and how the bank deployed the AI assistant to 46,000+ employees within the following areas — client onboarding and KYC, vendor management, regulatory reporting, lending, enterprise risk management, and sales enablement.
Do you know where Goldman Sachs is not using AI? Where it matters. “A well-timed trade amplifies gains. A mistaken one — executed at machine speed, across thousands of positions, before a human can intervene — amplifies losses just as fast.”
During the interview Mr. Blankfein said AI is not a problem because it can be smarter, but “because we don’t have the ability to test whether it’s right or not.”
And that is, in one sentence, the fundamental problem. All the hand waving from OpenAI and others how AI will take over and it will run everything, is just that — hand waving.
The recurrent pattern? Before you deploy any new technology, listen to and observe people with personal responsibility for accuracy and things which really matter. They would never ask ChatGPT about a risk in their portfolio. They need to know for sure.