Skip to content

⚡ Building ChatGPT for Finance — Joseph Kim, OpenAI's Head of Financial Services

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

27m
Transcript

Original podcast

Summary

Written by a model from the transcript; not yet reviewed.

This episode covers the launch and development of ChatGPT for Financial Services, OpenAI's first enterprise product tailored for the finance sector. The guest explains how OpenAI collaborated with design partners like Morgan Stanley and Evercore, why bundling curated data in-house was necessary to bypass high error rates in third-party connectors, and how they bridge research and deployment. The discussion also explores the role of human taste and judgment in AI model training, contrasting verifiable coding rewards with financial modeling, and outlines predictions for autonomous agency moving toward 2027.

  • Build product experiences that account for the state of the world and existing industry forces rather than relying solely on first principles. 4:32
  • Control critical data sources directly in-house if third-party marketplace connectors exhibit unacceptably high error rates. 6:04
  • Leverage existing hierarchical human review systems to maintain safety and oversight when deploying AI tools in banking. 12:02
  • Train reward models using human pairwise comparison to instill aesthetic judgment and taste into generative outputs like presentations. 16:33

Chapters

  1. 0:00
    Podcast Intro and Keynote Overview

    Hosts introduce the episode, explain the keynote context, and set up the discussion about building ChatGPT for Finance.

  2. 0:56
    Launch of ChatGPT for Financial Services

    Joseph Kim explains the new enterprise product, its features, and early partner feedback from Morgan Stanley and Evercore.

  3. 1:47
    Building a Finance‑Specific Model

    Discussion of how OpenAI integrates financial data into the main model, the importance of data control, and the role of research and deployment.

  4. 2:38
    Safety and Human‑in‑the‑Loop Design

    Exploration of safety measures, auditability, and designing the product to mirror human workflows in finance.

  5. 3:26
    Training Models for Taste and Human Judgment

    Kim explains how reinforcement learning with human preference is used to teach models aesthetic and contextual taste.

  6. 4:45
    Product vs. Research: The 80/20 Gap

    Kim describes how Codex provides 80% of needed functionality, and the remaining 20% is filled by enterprise‑specific customizations using the plugin architecture.

  7. 19:35
    Evaluating Financial AI Performance

    Challenges of creating reliable evals for finance, current gaps, and plans to build better benchmarks.

  8. 21:08
    Future of Finance AI: From Junior to MD Tasks

    Vision for scaling AI from routine analyst work to higher‑level decision making, requiring more research and data.

  9. 26:58
    Hiring and Community Engagement

    OpenAI's hiring needs, roles, and how finance professionals can contribute to product and research.

Highlights

  • 4:38

    Building Under One Roofstrategy

    OpenAI combined product development, model harness creation, and research under one roof for the first time with their finance product.

  • 6:04

    High Error Rates in MCPsdata

    The guest reveals that third-party Model Context Protocol connectors tested for financial data had error rates exceeding forty percent, forcing OpenAI to bring data ingestion in-house.

  • 14:31

    Factual Reliability vs Human Tasteinsight

    Models have drastically reduced egregious factual hallucinations since 2022, but still lack the subjective human taste and aesthetic judgment needed for polished work.

  • 16:27

    Training Models on Human Tastestrategy

    OpenAI trains models on aesthetic preferences by having humans evaluate pairs of slide decks to determine which layout looks better.

  • 24:55

    Saturated Financial Evalsdebate

    When running GPT-6 on financial evaluations, OpenAI discovered the benchmarks were entirely saturated and compromised by incorrect answer keys and flawed prompts.

  • 26:42

    Hiring Subject Matter Expertsstrategy

    To improve financial reasoning, OpenAI is actively hiring domain experts in investment banking, equity research, and asset management to guide researchers.

Quotes

  • “I really do think that there's gonna be a billion dollar business built on top of a chat G P T plugin.”
    Unnamed speaker · 0:00
  • “And that secret sauce might be data. It might be U I changes. It could be an integration.”
    Unnamed speaker · 8:59
  • “Safety is super, super important.”
    Unnamed speaker · 9:26
  • “The kind of egregious mistake that would get you fired, models are getting much better at and continue to get much better.”
    Unnamed speaker · 14:31

About this episode

Watch the full show on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-d1WTqIULs

Transcript

0:00
27:34

6,582 words · 3 speakers

Topics

  • Codex
  • OpenAI
  • ChatG P T
  • ChatG P T for Financial Services
  • Latent Space
  • A I E Finance
  • Morgan Stanley
  • Evercore
  • Codex desktop app
  • ChatG P T plugin

Page updated · transcript and summary are machine-generated