[warabe]

I attended several talks hosted by financial institutions, because I also in the industry. Unfortunately, I found that their presentations were somewhat high-level and abstract. It seemed as though the primary purpose of these talks was recruitment, rather than sharing their valuable expertise or experience, which I could easily expect given the industry's tendency to be secretive.

On the positive side, I also attended a presentation by Mathworks, which I found quite informative and easy to digest.

[sgt101]

I work in FS as well, although I am on the digging ditches side rather than research. My take is that there hasn't been much real value created by "new wave" AI so far, and what there is is very very dull stuff like enabling workflows. There are a lot of demos that don't really work and there is a lot of cynicism due to

a) Crypto - everyone got bombed by fintechs promising the earth for the last 5 years and everyone is bored and angry.

b) Watson - flat out lying to every Cxx in the industry for 10 years straight has built a certain reticence to commit investment needs to generate the numbers for the bonus's to projects that look too good to be true.

I was going to write "I expect interesting projects to emerge in 2024" but I'm not 100%, there are a lot of problems at the nuts and bolts level of using GenAI , model cost.. but also latency, reliability, manageability (prompts soon get out of hand), evaluation. There's a lot of noise, most of it well intentioned, but naive results that cause a flap and then disintegrate under inspection are not helpful. Add in concerns about model ownership, copyright, IP disclosure (from using others models, but also from your model spilling its guts under pressure, or from distillation), indemnity and liability and it might be quite a while before we realise the value from this tech in FS.

I feel that we are stumbling about in the dark.