The AI Book

CHAPTER 1The Future of AI in Finance

By Chee-We Ng¹

¹Venture Capitalist, Oak Seed Ventures

How will artificial intelligence (AI) transform finance? What can AI do and how can we get it to work? What do we need to do to regulate AI in finance? These are questions at the forefront of many minds as we try to investigate the future of finance.

AI, a loosely defined set of technologies that try to mimic human judgement and interaction, has been in use in banking and finance since its inception in the 1950s. AI encompasses everything from rule-based technologies and probability-based methods that detect fraud, through to primitive neural networks for optical recognition and automatic stock and option trading. Collectively, these technologies automate processes that were previously undertaken by human beings, often improving accuracy and efficiency. One might argue that none of these traditional AI technologies is truly intelligent; AI merely automates what was previously performed manually.

The Promise of Deep Learning

The recent excitement around AI has tended to be linked to deep learning in its various forms. To understand why deep learning technologies simultaneously inspire excitement among researchers (who believe that deep learning is the breakthrough in AI everyone has been waiting for), and fear among tech leaders and politicians, it is important to place deep learning in the context of what its component technologies have achieved in the past 6 years.

The most recent ...