Industry: Financial Services

Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of Citadel and Citadel Securities, has admitted he’s negotiating a GPT-4 enterprise-wide license for his companies.

Arguably, Citadel is one of the most successful hedge funds in history (Citadel Securities, instead, is a market maker). And hedge funds go to great lengths (and take many risks) to find an edge. Nonetheless, seeing such a successful and prominent player in the Financial industry preparing to adopt GPT-4 is a strong signal.

In the Splendid Edition of Synthetic Work Issue #2 (Law firms’ morale at an all-time high now that they can use AI to generate evil plans to charge customers more money), we discussed how some of the biggest and most prestigious law firms in the UK are adopting AI models to assist lawyers in mission-critical operations like mergers and acquisitions.

In the Splendid Edition of Synthetic Work Issue #4 (Medical AI to open new hospital in the metaverse to assist (human) ex doctors affected by severe depression) we saw how the Health Care industry is relying on AI for tasks like tumour identification where an error makes the difference between a life saved and one lost.

(Yes, I’ll also publish a Splendid Edition dedicated to the Finance industry at some point in the future.)

And so we now have three industries where mistakes have huge costs and can lead to extinction (as many hedge fund managers will tell you) embracing large language models. Even if they make up stuff. Even if they exhibit multiple personality disorders. Even if they can’t do basic math. Even if there is the risk that employees will fall in love with them and stop being productive.

Why is that?