AI Training (replaced soon?)
I went to a networking session on my campus with alums and I overheard chatter about banks automating the analyst "grunt work," but I’m curious if anyone here is actually on the other side of it? i.e training the models.
I recently found a site that’s specifically looking for finance pros to train LLMs on technical banking tasks. It pays up to $150/hr, asynchronous, no minimum hours. Tbh seems very inviting as a part time gig, so I can see why people do it.
if AI is already getting trained by thousands of Pros is IB (or finance in general) even worth pursuing? I feel like as a enrty level and a student this new AI will be more knowledgeable than I am no matter how you put it. I am worried, has anyone tried doing this? Whats the level of training you are doing?
I can send the link if someone wants to look at the training link i found.
if i was in college id look into degrees related towards AI, AR / VR, space related stuff, and any future oriented field. I'm sure you can search up some other emerging industries I'm missing here.
To answer your question, yeah finance is about to be heavily automated with AI so you are 100% correct to question whether it's even a worthwhile career path
Dooming for no reason
Junior roles aren’t gonna be wiped out before this guy graduates. Banking is up or out somebody has to fill the pipeline, how it looks might evolve but not as drastic as you’re making it sound
lol banking in 5 - 10 years will look closer maybe exactly what i describe. all that will be needed in finance will be salespeople, a few customer service / RM people, and decision makers. Everything else especially execution-oriented roles will be automated by AI.
Look at how fast S&T was automated in the 2000s bro. Once banks start automating juniors it will be a very fast transition. If it will cut costs, and if there is no regulation, then no reason it won't happen.
We have to be clear on what “training” technically means. Are investment bankers currently on the desk “training” AI to do junior banking tasks? No. They are buying AI application software from ChatGPT, copilot, hebbia, rogo, modelml etc. and trying to figure out how to get leverage from them. Access is still very limited but the most forward desks still aren’t see that much value from them yet.
Companies like Mercor, micro1, scale ai etc handshake are “applied AI labs” which is Silicon Valley jargon for “we’re trying gig-ify white collar work” so they hire professional bankers at $150/hour to “train models”. What you do on the job is basically IP theft lol, you build common deliverables like a LBO, CIM etc. and then you write the rubric for the model to determine what’s correct and then score the AI model’s attempt at doing it from a prompt you generated as the “expert”.
They then take the best prompts that make the clients look the best (Anthropic, Gemini, oAI, all the frontier models) and then “benchmark” the performance across clients. Then the clients take the most successful use cases the experts have surfaced and they productize them.
I think models are smart enough to do any banking job today if you ask it in the absolute perfect way, give it the exact information it needs to do the work, and then tell it exactly what to do step by step.
Only problem is that…that’s not how real life works, especially in our industry lol.
There is almost no protectable IP in building financial models. Basically every single element of it is public knowledge, especially since most of the modeling is just doing what's required by tax law/regulators.
There is almost no protectable IP in building slide decks. Pretty much everything from CIM building to IC decks and so on are standard products.
How is uploading a client version of a financial model not protectable IP when one tab includes an entire snapshot of its CRM at a point in time?
If you’re advising a client through a carve-out, and in the presentation you detail exactly which headcount they can cut / combine down to the individual level, that is not “public knowledge”.
Your definition of “protectable IP” does not align with FINRA’s definition of MNPI. If the content that goes within a CIM isn’t private information, why do interested parties have to execute NDAs to receive the documents?
Yes your run of the mill “Apple should submit a bid to buy Warner Brothers” DCF using information entirely found on FactSet or CapIQ isn’t valuable at all, the models can do that all day. That’s not what they’re hiring “experts” to hand in though, anyone with a brain can see this is their way to get private enterprise data to train the models without having to necessarily have the institutions themselves on as clients — which would greatly restrict what information does and does not get shared anyway.
How cooked are HS seniors that want a career in finance?
How cooked were the HS seniors that wanted a career in SWE 3 years ago? Very cooked.
If not finance then what….? I always wanted to do finance for as long as I can remember…
Bump
"I went to a networking session on my campus with alums and I overheard chatter about banks automating the analyst grunt work..." (Internal quotations omitted).
They have been doing this literally for decades. They will do it for decades to come. This is how technology works. The job will change in the future just like it has in the past.
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