We’re excited to have hosted the first-ever "LLMs and GenAI for Finance" workshop, bringing academia and industry together to shape the future of AI in finance! At Linq, we are committed to bridging the gap between cutting-edge LLM research and real-world applications such as workflow automation in finance!
The first workshop on "LLMs and GenAI for Finance (https://ai4f.org)" wrapped up successfully yesterday in NYC, bringing top experts from academia and industry. Here's how it came together: 1/ In July 2024, Prof. Yoon Kim, Prof. Valeri Nikolaev, and I recognized a gap between academic research on LLMs and their practical applications in finance. We aimed to bridge this with a dedicated workshop. 2/ We invited leaders to the organizing committee, including Prof. Andrew Lo and Prof. Eric So from MIT Sloan School of Management, Prof. Alejandro Lopez-Lira from University of Florida, Yu Yu. 3/ We reached out to industry experts like Andrew Chin, Ben Wellington, Edward Tong, PhD, Naftali Cohen. 4/ Over 80 papers were submitted in response to our call for papers. 5/ Demand was so high that we expanded capacity twice to accommodate everyone. 6/ More than 300 attendees joined, making it the largest workshop at ICAIF '24. ?????? While there were many valuable insights,?here are some that left a strong impression: - Andrew Chin: In the near term, the next year or so, a lot of focus is on the efficiency side. Three to five years from now, I think all of those tools will really help us understand how to make better investment decisions. - Ben Wellington: LLMs have opened up a world where I once had a thousand ideas and could test ten of them. Now I can test hundreds of those ideas. - Valeri Nikolaev: There are remarkable complementarities between LLMs, which use a reasoning-based approach, and traditional quant models. In the future, I think we will see applications of both approaches, and they may be combined together. - Andrew Lo: We need to focus not on data, not on computation, not on impressive research results, but rather on narrative on quantifying and optimizing narrative as an essential part of generative AI. The insights from this workshop show just how far we’ve come in exploring LLMs in finance, and reveal how much academia and industry can achieve through collaboration. Thank you to all the attendees and presenters for making this event possible. We’re already looking forward to bringing this workshop back in 2025 and continuing to push the boundaries of what’s possible, together!