Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) evolve rapidly as Large Language Models (LLMs) was equipped with vision modules to create more human-like models. However, we should carefully evaluate their applications in different domains, as they may possess undesired biases. Our work studies the potential behavioral biases of LVLMs from a behavioral finance perspective, an interdisciplinary subject that jointly considers finance and psychology. We propose an end-to-end framework, from data collection to new evaluation metrics, to assess LVLMs' reasoning capabilities and the dynamic behaviors manifested in two established human financial behavioral biases: recency bias and authority bias. Our evaluations find that recent open-source LVLMs such as LLaVA-NeXT, MobileVLM-V2, Mini-Gemini, MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5 and Phi-3-vision-128k suffer significantly from these two biases, while the proprietary model GPT-4o is negligibly impacted. Our observations highlight directions in which open-source models can improve. The code is available at https://github.com/mydcxiao/vlm_behavioral_fin.

FIFTY YEARS ago investing was a distinctly human affair. "People would have to take each other out, and dealers would entertain fund managers, and no one would know what the prices were," says Ray Dalio, who worked on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in the early 1970s before founding Bridgewater Associates, now the world's largest hedge fund. Kenneth Jacobs, the boss of Lazard, an investment bank, remembers using a pocket calculator to analyse figures gleaned from company reports. His older colleagues used slide rules. Even by the 1980s "reading the Wall Street Journal on your way into work, a television on the trading floor and a ticker tape" offered a significant information advantage, recalls one investor. Since then the role humans play in trading has diminished rapidly. In their place have come computers, algorithms and passive managers--institutions which offer an index fund that holds a basket of shares to match the return of the stockmarket, or sectors of it, rather than trying to beat it (see chart 1).

Billionaire serial entrepreneur Richard Branson told the New York Times in June that a universal basic income is an appropriate response to income inequality. "A basic income should be introduced in Europe and in America," Branson told David Gelles of the Times. "It's a disgrace to see people sleeping on the streets with this material wealth all around them." In particular, Branson said the acceleration of machine intelligence is driving the need of cash payments. "I think with artificial intelligence coming along, there needs to be a basic income," said Branson.

It takes money to make money and right now a lot of that money is going into the development of artificial intelligence. From hedge funds to venture capital firms, everyone in finance has some idea about how data and quantitative analysis will reshape their industry. Firms like Signal Fire track engineers as they move from company to company to draw attention to growing startups. And funds like Numerai and Quantopian are putting faith in quants to determine optimal trading strategies. Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's most robust and reliable money making machines, is going as far as to attempt to automate its internal management processes to ensure the longevity of its $150 billion under management.

The world's biggest money manager on Tuesday announced that it would cut more than 40 jobs, replacing some of its human portfolio managers with artificially intelligent, computerized stock-trading algorithms. Research, after all, has shown that active stock pickers generally underperform the wider stock market, leading customers to balk at the high fees those managers charge. Investors are increasingly seeking cheaper options such as exchange-traded funds, some of which are managed by computers--a trend that helped push BlackRock's assets under management above $5 trillion for the first time recently. The layoffs due to automation are an industry-wide shift. By 2025, financial institutions will reduce their human workforce by 10%--resulting in roughly 230,000 fewer heads--as computers take their place, the financial services consultancy Opimas estimates in a recent report.

Bridgewater Associates, the world's largest hedge fund, is building an artificial intelligence engine to automate the management of the company, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Ray Dalio, Bridgewater's founder, wants the AI system to handle everything from the day-to-day management of investments down to organising staff's days and even hiring and firing, according to the report. Bridgewater, which has $160 billion (£130 billion) under management, already has algorithms that inform the strategy of its "Pure Alpha" fund, measuring hundreds of economic data points. But the new AI system, referred to as the "Book of the Future" by Dalio and the Principles Operating System officially, would apply data science principles to management, picking up on internal data points such as personality tests and internal polls in meetings. Bridgewater has a number of internal apps employees can use for things like grading colleagues.

Robots could soon be hiring and firing staff at the world's largest hedge fund under secret plans drawn up to improve efficiency. A team of engineers at US-based Bridgewater Associates is reportedly developing artificial intelligence which can run the firm without emotions getting in the way. Billionaire founder Ray Dalio is seeking to create a new business model where most employees are programmers and decisions are made by a computer, according to the Daily Mail. He appointed a clandestine team, called the Systemised Intelligence Lab, to work on the project early in 2015. It is overseen by David Ferruci, a renowned developer who created IBM's Watson supercomputer.

Robots could soon be hiring and firing staff at the world's largest hedge fund under secret plans drawn up to improve efficiency. A team of engineers at US-based Bridgewater Associates is reportedly developing artificial intelligence which can run the firm without emotions getting in the way. Billionaire founder Ray Dalio is seeking to create a new business model where most employees are programmers and decisions are made by a computer. He appointed a clandestine team, called the Systemised Intelligence Lab, to work on the project early in 2015. It is overseen by David Ferruci, a renowned developer who created IBM's Watson supercomputer.

The world's largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making. Bridgewater Associates has a team of software engineers working on the project at the request of billionaire founder Ray Dalio, who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he's not there, the Wall Street Journal reported. "The role of many remaining humans at the firm wouldn't be to make individual choices but to design the criteria by which the system makes decisions, intervening when something isn't working," wrote the Journal, which spoke to five former and current employees. The firm, which manages $160bn, created the team of programmers specializing in analytics and artificial intelligence, dubbed the Systematized Intelligence Lab, in early 2015. The unit is headed up by David Ferrucci, who previously led IBM's development of Watson, the supercomputer that beat humans at Jeopardy! in 2011.

World's largest hedge fund to replace managers with artificial intelligence The world's largest hedge fund is building a piece of software to automate the day-to-day management of the firm, including hiring, firing and other strategic decision-making. Bridgewater Associates has a team of software engineers working on the project at the request of billionaire founder Ray Dalio, who wants to ensure the company can run according to his vision even when he's not there, the Wall Street Journal reported. "The role of many remaining humans at the firm wouldn't be to make individual choices but to design the criteria by which the system makes decisions, intervening when something isn't working," wrote the Journal, which spoke to five former and current employees. The firm, which manages $160bn, created the team of programmers specializing in analytics and artificial intelligence, dubbed the Systematized Intelligence Lab, in early 2015. The unit is headed up by David Ferrucci, who previously led IBM's development of Watson, the supercomputer that beat humans at Jeopardy! in 2011.