Artificial Intelligence in Finance: Opportunities and Challenges

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new kid on the block anymore and the field is developing at a constantly increasing pace. Pretty much every day there is some kind of new development, be it a research paper announcing a new or improved machine learning algorithm, a new library for one of the most popular programming languages (Python/R/Julia), etc. In the past, many of those advances did not make it to mainstream media. But that is also changing rapidly. Some of the recent examples include the AlphaGo beating the 18-time world champion at Go [1], using Deep Learning to generate realistic faces of humans that never existed [2], or the spread of Deep Fakes -- images or videos placing people in situations that never actually happened.