🌟 AI in Finance: Transforming the Future of Money🌟

Citi GPS has released a report on the impact of AI in finance, highlighting key trends and forecasts. Here are the main takeaways:

1. 📈 By 2028, global banking profits are projected to reach $2 trillion, driven by AI adoption.

2. 🚀 Just as the steam engine and the internet revolutionized their eras, AI is expected to commoditize human intelligence, with finance leading this transformation.

3. 🔄 Technological advances historically eliminate some jobs and create new ones. AI is anticipated to accelerate this cycle.

4. 🧪 Currently, generative AI in finance is mostly in the proof-of-concept stage, but rapid and unprecedented transitions are happening.

5. 🔄 Incumbent financial firms are integrating AI into existing products to boost efficiency, while startups are leveraging AI to transform traditional financial services.

6. 🤖 The rise of AI agents and bots will change #money and #finance, potentially creating a world where machines perform transactions with minimal human intervention.

7. 📊 AI can significantly enhance productivity in banks by automating routine tasks, optimizing operations, and allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities.

8. ⚠️ Challenges and Risks: The shift to AI raises concerns about data security, regulation, compliance, and ethics. AI’s propensity for hallucinations and generating false information poses reputational risks for financial institutions.

9. ⏱️ Adoption Speed: Digital companies built on cloud technologies are likely to adopt AI faster, followed by established banks. Those burdened with legacy tech and culture may lag, potentially losing market share.

AI in Finance

How well LLMs like GPT-4 grasp complex human thoughts and emotions

Researchers have taken a deep dive into understanding how well large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 grasp complex human thoughts and emotions. 🤔🧠 This human ability, known as higher-order theory of mind (ToM), lets us think about what others believe, feel, and know in a layered way (like “I think you believe she knows”). 📚

The study introduced a new test called Multi-Order Theory of Mind Q&A to measure this skill. They tested five advanced LLMs and compared them to adult human performance. 📊👩‍🔬

Key Findings:

• GPT-4 and Flan-PaLM perform at or near adult human levels on ToM tasks. 👏

• GPT-4 even surpasses adult performance in making 6th-order inferences! 🚀

• There’s a clear link between the size of the model and fine-tuning in achieving these ToM abilities.

Why does this matter? Higher-order ToM is crucial for many human interactions, both cooperative and competitive. 🤝🏆 These findings could greatly impact how we design user-facing AI applications, making them more intuitive and effective.

Try 6th-order inferences yourself (“I know that you think that she knows that he fears that I will believe that you understand”), and you’ll realize that humans have no business handling 7th and higher orders.

🔗 Check out the full study for more insights: LLMs achieve adult human performance on higher-order theory of mind tasks

The Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM)

The Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM) is an advanced AI framework developed by Facebook AI for the purpose of creating highly effective recommendation systems. Here is an explanation of DLRM:

Key Components of DLRM

1. Embedding Layers:

Purpose: Convert categorical features (e.g., user IDs, product IDs) into dense vector representations.

Function: These layers map high-dimensional sparse input data into a lower-dimensional continuous space, which helps in capturing semantic similarities.

2. Bottom MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptron):

Purpose: Process dense features (e.g., numerical inputs like age, price).

Function: A series of fully connected layers that transform and combine dense features before they are combined with embedded features.

3. Interaction Operation:

Purpose: Model the interactions between different features.

Function: DLRM uses dot products between pairs of embedded vectors to capture feature interactions. This step is crucial as it helps in understanding how different features (like user preferences and item attributes) interact with each other.

4. Top MLP:

Purpose: Combine the outputs from the interaction operation and process them further.

Function: Another series of fully connected layers that take the interaction results and dense features to produce the final recommendation score.

How DLRM Works

1. Input Handling:

• Categorical features are passed through embedding layers to obtain dense vectors.

• Dense features are processed through the bottom MLP to transform them appropriately.

2. Feature Interaction:

• Dense vectors from the embedding layers undergo pairwise dot product operations to capture interactions.

• The resulting interaction vectors, along with the processed dense features, are concatenated.

3. Final Prediction:

• The concatenated features are fed into the top MLP, which outputs a prediction score.

• This score can be used to rank items for recommendation or predict the likelihood of an event (e.g., click-through rate).

Applications of DLRM

E-commerce: Suggesting products to users based on their browsing history and preferences.

Social Media: Recommending friends, groups, or content based on user activity and interests.

Online Advertising: Predicting click-through rates to optimize ad placements and targeting.

Advantages of DLRM

Scalability: Designed to handle large-scale datasets typical in recommendation tasks.

Flexibility: Can incorporate both categorical and continuous features, making it versatile for various applications.

Performance: Optimized for high performance in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency.

DLRM is a powerful tool in the arsenal of data scientists and engineers working on personalized recommendation systems, leveraging the strengths of deep learning to provide better, more relevant suggestions to users.

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is a type of recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture that is widely used in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) for processing and predicting time series data and sequences. Here’s an explanation of LSTM:

Key Components of LSTM

1. Memory Cell:

Purpose: Maintain information over long periods.

Function: The cell state (memory) runs through the entire sequence, providing a way to carry forward relevant information.

2. Gates:

Forget Gate:

Purpose: Decide what information to discard from the cell state.

Function: Uses a sigmoid layer to output a number between 0 and 1, which is multiplied by the cell state to forget irrelevant information.

Input Gate:

Purpose: Determine what new information to add to the cell state.

Function: Uses a combination of a sigmoid layer and a tanh layer to update the cell state with new information.

Output Gate:

Purpose: Decide what part of the cell state to output.

Function: Uses a sigmoid layer to decide which parts of the cell state to output, usually after passing through a tanh layer.

How LSTM Works

1. Forget Gate:

• Takes the previous hidden state and the current input and processes them through a sigmoid function to produce a forget gate vector.

• This vector determines which information to keep or forget from the previous cell state.

2. Input Gate:

• Processes the previous hidden state and the current input through a sigmoid function to produce an input gate vector.

• Uses a tanh function to create a vector of new candidate values that could be added to the cell state.

• Multiplies the input gate vector by the candidate vector to decide which new information to update the cell state with.

3. Cell State Update:

• The old cell state is multiplied by the forget gate vector to forget irrelevant information.

• The result is then added to the new candidate values (filtered by the input gate vector) to form the new cell state.

4. Output Gate:

• Processes the previous hidden state and the current input through a sigmoid function to produce an output gate vector.

• The new cell state is passed through a tanh function and then multiplied by the output gate vector to produce the final output (new hidden state).

Applications of LSTM

Natural Language Processing (NLP): Text generation, machine translation, speech recognition, and sentiment analysis.

Time Series Prediction: Stock price prediction, weather forecasting, and economic forecasting.

Anomaly Detection: Identifying unusual patterns in data, such as fraud detection and predictive maintenance.

Advantages of LSTM

Long-Term Dependency Learning: LSTM can learn and remember over long sequences, making it effective for tasks where context from far back in the sequence is important.

Gradient Vanishing and Exploding: LSTM mitigates the vanishing gradient problem, which is common in traditional RNNs, through its gating mechanism.

Versatility: Effective in various domains involving sequential data, from text and speech to time series and sensor data.


LSTMs are a powerful tool in the field of deep learning and AI, providing the capability to handle complex sequence dependencies and making significant advancements in various applications involving time-series and sequential data.

The Transformer model – Explained

The Transformer model, introduced in the paper “Attention Is All You Need,” revolutionised natural language processing (NLP) by enabling highly efficient training and inference using attention mechanisms. Here’s an explanation focusing on both training and inference phases, with particular emphasis on inference.

Transformer Training

1. Model Architecture:

Encoder-Decoder Structure: The Transformer consists of an encoder and a decoder, each composed of multiple layers.

Attention Mechanisms:

Self-Attention: Each position in the sequence attends to all other positions in the same sequence to capture dependencies.

Multi-Head Attention: Multiple self-attention mechanisms run in parallel to capture different types of dependencies.

Feed-Forward Neural Networks: Positioned after attention mechanisms to further process the attended information.

2. Training Process:

Input Preparation:

Tokenization: Splitting text into tokens (words or subwords).

Embedding: Converting tokens into dense vectors.

Positional Encoding: Adding positional information to embeddings to account for the order of tokens.

Forward Pass:

Encoder: Processes the input sequence, generating a set of context-aware representations.

Decoder: Uses the encoder’s output along with the target sequence (shifted right) to generate predictions.

Loss Calculation: Comparing the model’s predictions to the actual target sequence using a loss function, typically cross-entropy.

Backpropagation: Updating the model parameters to minimize the loss.

Optimization: Using optimization algorithms like Adam to adjust weights based on gradients.

Transformer Inference

Inference in the Transformer model is the process of using the trained model to generate predictions or translations from new input data. This is particularly crucial in applications like machine translation, text generation, and summarization.

Key Steps in Transformer Inference

1. Input Encoding:

• The input sequence is tokenized and embedded, similar to the training process.

• Positional encodings are added to the embeddings.

2. Encoder Pass:

• The input embeddings are processed through the encoder layers to generate encoded representations.

• Self-attention mechanisms capture dependencies within the input sequence.

3. Decoder Initialization:

• The decoder starts with a special start-of-sequence token (e.g., ).

• Initial hidden states are set up, often including context from the encoder’s output.

4. Iterative Decoding:

Step-by-Step Generation: The decoder generates the output sequence one token at a time.

Self-Attention and Encoder-Decoder Attention:

• The decoder’s self-attention focuses on previously generated tokens.

• The encoder-decoder attention layer attends to the encoder’s output, incorporating contextual information from the input sequence.

Output Token Prediction: At each step, the decoder outputs a probability distribution over the vocabulary.

Token Selection: The next token is selected based on the highest probability (greedy search) or using techniques like beam search to explore multiple paths and select the most likely sequence.

5. Termination:

• The process continues until a special end-of-sequence token (e.g., ) is generated or a maximum length is reached.

Inference Techniques

Greedy Search: Selects the token with the highest probability at each step. Simple and fast but may not always yield the best results.

Beam Search: Keeps multiple hypotheses at each step, exploring several paths to find the most likely sequence. Balances quality and computational efficiency.

Sampling: Randomly samples tokens based on their probabilities. Useful for generating diverse and creative outputs.

Advantages of Transformer Inference

Parallelization: Unlike RNNs, the Transformer’s architecture allows for parallel processing of tokens, making both training and inference faster.

Handling Long Dependencies: The self-attention mechanism effectively captures long-range dependencies in the data.

Scalability: Transformers scale well with increased data and model sizes, improving performance on large datasets.

Applications of Transformer Inference

Machine Translation: Translating text from one language to another.

Text Generation: Generating coherent and contextually relevant text.

Summarization: Creating concise summaries of longer documents.

Question Answering: Providing accurate answers to questions based on given contexts.

Transformers have become the foundation for many state-of-the-art NLP models, such as BERT, GPT, and T5, due to their powerful attention mechanisms and scalability.

Generative AI: Leveling the Playing Field for SMEs in Marketing

In a world where marketing has often been dominated by big budgets, generative AI is empowering small and midsized enterprises (SMEs) to level the playing field. 🌍

From creating stunning visuals and engaging content with tools like Jasper and Canva, to leveraging open-source models for cost-effective AI capabilities, SMEs are now equipped to compete with the giants. 🖥️✨

AI-driven insights and data analysis are unlocking new strategies for smaller companies, making advanced marketing accessible and affordable. 📊🔍

The future is here, and it’s brighter than ever for SMEs ready to embrace AI! 🌟

GenAI Is Leveling the Playing Field for Smaller Businesses

AI and cryptocurrencies are two revolutionary technologies with different development paths.


AI and cryptocurrencies are two revolutionary technologies with different development paths: AI emerged top-down from prestigious universities, while cryptocurrencies rose bottom-up from underground forums.

During the recent SuperAI Conference in Singapore (June 5-6, 2024), former CTO of Coinbase, Balaji Srinivasan, presented an intriguing topic: “AI and Crypto, Beyond Cliches: AI Makes Everything Easy to Fake. Crypto Makes It Hard Again.” Here are the 10 main messages:

1. AI is probabilistic, Crypto is deterministic:

Modern AI is largely statistical while crypto is procedural. Compare diffusion models and LLMs to cryptography.

2. AI is digital abundance, Crypto is digital scarcity:

Generative AI augments (or substitutes) human writers, researchers, artists, lawyers, and doctors, making these services abundant. Crypto, by contrast, digitizes currency, stocks, loans, and assets, representing scarcity in a natively digital fashion.

3. AI makes things easy to fake, Crypto makes it hard again:

How do we know whether a given generated piece of text or image is “real”? We need some kind of cryptographic verification.

4. AI generates, Crypto authenticates:

Modify the IPFS/ENS stack to determine whether a piece of content was provably publicly authored by a given ENS name.

5. AI busts captchas, Crypto rebuilds them:

AI can now bust just about any CAPTCHA. So, we may need to retreat to cryptographic scarcity, paying or signing in with a high-reputation crypto address.

6. AI proselytizes, Crypto verifies:

In generated text, we don’t just want the output to have references; we want these to be on-chain references.

7. AI breaks the public web, Crypto builds Web3 of trust:

Much content on the world wide web is becoming fake or generated. But with “Web3 of trust,” we can start restoring signal for backlinks.

8. AI training is centralized, Crypto can decentralize it:

We have centralized training + centralized deployment (like OpenAI), and centralized training + decentralized deployment (like Llama 3). Ideally, we want decentralized training and deployment. Crypto crowdfunding could enable this.

9. AI evaluation is centralized, Crypto can decentralize it:

AI model evaluation is moving to something that can be done on individual beefy machines. Imagine decentralized evaluation of different versions of a model, similar to hosting a node.

10. AI creates new authorities, Crypto decentralizes them:

It’ll be a “polytheistic” rather than “monotheistic” model of AI. Every sufficiently large community crowdfunds an AI that serves as the central guiding force of their community. What would George Washington do, what would Lee Kuan Yew do?

Full presentation (20min) is available on YouTube: Watch here

🔊 GenAI Voice Agents: Transforming Calls Forever! 🚀

GenAI is reinventing the phone call, allowing businesses and consumers to save time, reduce costs, and enhance experiences. Let’s dive into how B2B and B2C AI voice agents are making waves across industries and explore the exciting potential in healthcare!

B2B AI Voice Agents:

💼 Efficiency Boost: Companies can save on labor costs, allocate resources to revenue-generating activities, and provide consistent customer experiences.

📞 Vertical Focus: Voice agents tailored for specific industries (e.g., auto services, appointment scheduling) ensure high performance and integration ease.

🔧 Customization & Control: Enterprises can choose between full-stack platforms for simplicity or self-assembled stacks for flexibility and cost control.

B2C AI Voice Agents:

👥 Human-like Services: From therapy to coaching, AI voice agents offer accessible, high-quality interactions without the need for human operators.

🎯 New Experiences: The real magic lies in creating new conversational experiences, providing unique value that text interfaces can’t match.

Industries Impacted:

🏥 Healthcare: Appointment scheduling, patient follow-ups, and telehealth consultations can be revolutionized with AI voice agents.

🚗 Automotive Services: Streamlining service bookings and customer support.

📅 Professional Services: Enhancing customer interactions and support in sectors like finance, legal, and consulting.

GenAI Voice Agents in Healthcare:

🩺 Appointment Scheduling: Seamlessly manage patient bookings, reducing no-shows and administrative burdens.

📞 Patient Follow-ups: Ensure timely follow-ups and care reminders, improving patient outcomes.

👩‍⚕️ Telehealth: Enhance virtual consultations, providing instant, accurate information and support.

The future of communication is here, and GenAI voice agents are leading the charge! 🚀✨

Thesis on AI Voice Agents