“When it comes to AI and investing, what is hype, and what is reality?”
That question, posed by Bloomberg anchor Katie Greifeld, was the focus of a June 8 discussion with Two Sigma Co-Chairman David Siegel and Sixth Street Vice Chairman Marty Chavez at the Bloomberg Invest 2023 summit in New York City.
“The hype is absolutely remarkable,” answered Siegel, “and I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” He pointed out that people generally may not realize that while large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have been making headlines recently, we have all been interacting with them, and other techniques like deep learning, for a long time. What’s really changed is society’s awareness of it.
Still early days
Siegel, who has been experimenting with AI since his days as a doctoral student at MIT decades ago, acknowledged that the newest LLMs clearly have many interesting—and even surprising—abilities that are worth researching further. However, he cautioned, the technology still isn’t reliable enough to use in business-critical applications without significant human intervention and oversight.
For that reason, while such innovations are going to continue to have a major impact on finance, investing, and society more broadly, artificial intelligence is still very much in its early days—and a great deal of basic R&D will be required before its abilities truly match all the hype.
Watch a replay of the full discussion:
