Jan Szilagyi, co-founder and chief executive officer of Toggle AI, a generative artificial intelligence fintech startup that uses machine learning to turn institutional-grade data into insights for investors, discusses what generative and predictive AI mean for financial firms in Wall Street and around the globe.

Manhattan

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

Rise of AI

How generative AI could change Wall Street

Let me get started with just your views on what shifting trends we're seeing in the industry in terms of A.I. and how Wall Street is using your technology. Yeah great question. So there's obviously a lot of excitement about the technology. I think that also there's a lot of uncertainty about where it's going to lead us. But what we have seen is there is very quick adoption and experimentation with the technology and the early cases that we have seen in at least our technologies people are using it to better search for data documents and so on. So discover ability. All right. We should point out that you have been an algorithmic quant guy for a while. You've worked in the hedge fund field. In fact you work closely with Stan Druckenmiller at Duquesne. He is now an investor in toggle a. You've also worked for Fortress and other major hedge funds. So this has been around for a while in the quieter world of hedge funds. Only recently have the banks jumped in. How are the questions that they're asking you different and the applications. Yeah. Again really really exciting to see that this is widening the scope of people who are able to use this technology. I would say that the biggest evolution that we have seen specifically with respect to also large language models is that it has enabled somebody who would like to go back and use data analytics to simply state what they would like to do. And the machine being able to understand that find the data and run the analysis. So I would say if this is a Rosetta Stone moment for software it's really allowing somebody like you might with Siri just control the machine and get what you need done. Yeah. And what is the biggest risk for your business. Is it regulatory. The biggest risk to at least when it comes to banks certainly does come from the regulatory side. I think there are concerns as I think we all know about whether or not some of the results are accurate. There are also concerns about the evolution of this technology and potentially abuse of it. But I think that there are enough safeguards that everybody is putting in place and thinking about early on that we are going to be able to and we have been successfully been able to overcome that so far. So how broad are your clients in terms of location. Is it all U.S. based. Do you have more overseas clients and do their preferences differ. So we do have quite a number of clients for example in Asia specifically. We have a number of clients brokerage houses in in Korea for example Samsung Securities and so on. We have M.U.F.G. in Japan line securities and so on. So that's in addition to let's say interactive brokers here in the U.S. and fidelity. So I would say our reach is very broad. The use cases do vary of course. I think that there are some that are varying on the horizon of the questions that they will be asking. There is also the asset class that differs from one institution to another. But I would say broadly there are a lot of similarities which I think is exciting because it means that there is a lot of scalability to this technology and is truly in front of our eyes changing how people are interacting with the data. Yeah. And getting back to the versatility of A.I. and the different applications I do know in the hedge fund world you're using sophisticated trades such as interest rate swaps equity derivatives and crunching the research at a much more accelerated rate than was possible before. But on the big banks and I understand the U.S. Wall Street banks every major bank is either talking you are already a client. What are they looking at. I understand wealth management is an application. Yeah. So I think that's exactly where I think currently a lot of the focus is. I think wealth managers are looking for tools that would help them serve their clients better. Again trying to get that level of additional certainty when they provide advice and having a tool like toggle which you know they're also able to try just by going online and effectively test to see how it fits them. It really allows them to do a lot of that on the spot analysis for their clients. Well I want to point out that even critics whether it's the SEC's Gensler or the Fed's Michael Barr are talking about how transformative this is. At the beginning of the Internet age there was one quote that hey the Internet doesn't make you faster. It makes you stupid fat. It doesn't make you smarter. It makes you stupid faster. How about the rapid pace at which some of these trades can be done. Is that a danger in and of itself. I think that you know to the extent that it accelerates the pace of decision making. I don't think that it's a danger in itself because what we are providing is effectively a tool that hopefully actually makes your decision making better more solid more grounded in facts and data and so on. And so I would say people would previously still have done the trade but maybe they would have gone with their intuition. Now they don't have to. They can just check the data and say oh actually you know what. I thought that this was a sell off. I should be buying into. It turns out that I'm way too early.

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Arizona

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Council of the City of Sydney

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Israel-Gaza War

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Canberra

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Odesa

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Rise of AI