Upstart reported slipping revenues and forecasts that fell short of analysts' expectations. Girouard remains positive about their position.
In the long take this week, I try out a contrarian point of view on personal finance chatbots. Trim, a savings chatbot, just withdrew support from Facebook Messenger. While lots of other chatbots are still invested in conversational banking, what could we take away from the counterfactual of chatbots failing to get B2C traction? What is the impact on the rest of the platform wars waged by Amazon, Google, and Tesla for connected homes, cars, and the Internet of Things?
AI GPT, is known for its "generative" attributes, but the transformer model underlying its evolution could make the biggest impact.
Within a decade, the form factor for computing will radically change from staring at screens with flat imagery, to participating in embedded virtual worlds with fully navigable, hyper-realistic environments. Those environments will be filled with software agents, some hybrid human and others entirely AI, that are entirely unrecognizable as anything but real to 90% of the population.
By leveraging the benefits of artificial intelligence and looking at cash flow issues from the consumer’s perspective, Beem has grown to be one of the 50 most-downloaded financial apps in the world.
Fighting Chinese Artificial Intelligence with lasers and American Crypto with European Central Banks
How do the Americans and the Chinese have such different ethical takes on privacy, self-sovereignty, media, and the role of government? We can trace the root cause to the DNA of the macro-organism in which individuals reside, itself built over centuries and millenia from the collective scar tissue of local human experience. But there is more to observe. The technology now being deployed in each jurisdiction -- like social credit, surveillance artificial intelligence, monitored payment rails, and central bank cryptocurrency -- will drive a software architecture into the core of our societies that reflects the current moment. And it will be nearly impossible to change! This is why *how* we democratize access to financial services matters. We must be careful about the form, because we will be stuck with it like Americans are stuck with the core banking systems from the 1970s. But the worry is not inefficiency, it is programmed social strata.
InformedIQ helps lenders find opportunities in today’s challenging environment while others pull back. The main difference is who embraces AI.
Today's corporations and governments are in the business of defining the balance of these aspects of our participation in society and the economy. Beliefs about the immutability of different attributes about what makes a person (or an employee) and how economies are built (cutting the pie, vs. growing the pie) determine the policy decisions you make, top down. As the core example this week, let's take Deutsche Bank. Facing pricing pressure and headwinds in several of its businesses, Deutsche is responding with a plan to fire 18,000 employees by 2022 and an announced investment of €13 Billion in technology and innovation by 2022. They even spun up a hipster-colored neobank as a proof point. Wall Street ain't buying it.
What we know intuitively, and what the software shows, is that the pixelated image can be expanded into a cone of multiple probable outcomes. The same pixelated face can yield millions of various, uncanny permutations. These mathematical permutations of our human flesh exit in an area which is called “latent space”. The way to pick one out of the many is called “gradient descent”.
Imagine you are standing in an open field, and see many beautiful hills nearby. Or alternately, imagine you are standing on a hill, looking across the rolling valleys. You decide to pick one of these valleys, based on how popular or how close it is. This is gradient descent, and the valley is the generated face. Which way would you go?
Lenders gravitate towards using artificial intelligence (AI), so they must be dedicated to removing biases from their models. Luckily there are tools to help them maximize returns and minimize risks.