ChatGPT: Challenges and opportunities for financial services - The East African

It's been decades since algorithmic trading transformed Wall Street with its high-frequency trading, and years since the financial services industry began to integrate artificial intelligence in areas such as fraud detection, lending decisions and robo-advisory services. Yet the recent explosion of generative AI tools like ChatGPT – providing human-like text on seemingly any subject and any style so successfully it easily conquers the vaunted Turing Test – has opened the floodgates of possibilities. The advent of such a power language processor like ChatGPT – open source and available for public use – threatens to upend various parts of the financial services industry, spanning beyond areas such as chat bots and robo-advisors to even the workforce needed in something as skilled as coding. As artificial intelligence reaches a crucial tipping point – and AI bias lingers – whether the proper private and public controls are put in place ahead of the technology's dizzying progress becomes even more urgent yet challenging. In a recent Nvidia survey, 78 percent of financial services companies said they use at least one kind of artificial intelligence tool.