Bloomberg announces large-scale AI model trained on financial data while deep fake video promotes transparency standard for digitally created content

First, Bloomberg has announced BloombergGPT,  new large-scale generative artificial intelligence (AI) model. This large language model (LLM) has been specifically trained on a wide range of financial data to support a diverse set of natural language processing (NLP) tasks within the financial industry.

The company says it was trained on a corpus of over 700 billion tokens (or word fragments). For context, GPT-3, released in 2020, was trained on about 500 billion.  Of the 700 million-plus tokens, 363 billion are taken from Bloomberg’s financial data, the sort of information that powers its terminals — “the largest domain-specific dataset yet” constructed, it says. Another 345 billion tokens come from “general purpose datasets” obtained from elsewhere.  The company-specific data, named FinPile, consists of “a range of English financial documents including news, filings, press releases, web-scraped financial documents, and social media drawn from the Bloomberg archives.”

Second, you may have seen the video of the woman in a black turtleneck who says you can’t trust your eyes.   It’s an AI-generated deep fake; the video also tells on itself. A menu in the top left helpfully informs you that the video “contains AI-generated content.” There’s a timestamp and a credit.   It was released on Tuesday by technology company Truepic and production studio Revel.ai to promote the idea of a relatively new transparency standard for digitally created content.

I wanted to end the week with some big thoughts here.   Chris Messina and Brian McCullough at the Tech Meme Ride home have offered a theory of varietals of AI.  Like wine and the choice of grape, AI and the choice of model will produce different outcomes.  I like this concept… because it extends nicely to the sommelier.   Just like a sommelier can match a customer to the wine that fits their palate, a solution provider can be the sommelier for marching a customer to the AI model that fits their needs.

BloombergGPT is an example of how these models become specific for the industry, which is good for a diversity of ecosystems and options for service providers.

And I wanted to highlight the technology that may be part of the authentication of digitally created content because trust will be a crucial element to their use.