Welcome to the latest episode of At the Forefront: Fintech Conversations!
To learn more and listen to our previous episodes, click here.
In this episode, Forefront Senior Vice President CJ Lengua sits down with Eric Jensen, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Causality Link. Founded in 2016, Causality Link offers a research platform that takes a multi-disciplinary, AI-based approach to read and parse millions of words of news per day, with the goal of helping users uncover not just what is happening, but why.
A few months ago, Causality Link announced the addition of generative AI to its platform – combining it with existing causal and neurosymbolic AI models – to power new alerts functionality. The alerts feature detects emerging trends, serves them directly to users via plain-English summaries and links back to the original source documents for further analysis.
To kick off the conversation, Eric unpacks the details of the new functionality. While Causality Link has been harnessing the power of AI since its founding, it wanted to develop technology that was even better at surfacing faint signals from an often overwhelming volume of news stories. Causality Link’s platform, he explains, scans an average of 70,000 public news articles daily (translating up to 27 languages into English) and identifies each finding with relevant companies, industries, countries and macroeconomic concepts. By combining its existing technology with generative AI, the team built a solution that works passively behind the scenes, yet produces alerts that are easy for users to consume, helping them stay on top of the latest trends.
Next, CJ and Eric discuss use cases for this enhanced functionality. Applications for portfolio managers and analysts, Eric explains, are straightforward given that the system is purpose-built to access, digest and synthesize massive amounts of relevant market information. By flagging novel alerts, the platform delivers uniquely curated news that can help these players hone a competitive edge. However, the alerts feature is not limited to this audience – it is built for almost every class of user, from professional investors to investor relations departments to corporate strategists.
Causality Link has prioritized an easy user experience with this new offering. Clients can sign up by simply providing an email address and selecting desired ticker symbols or industries of interest. In addition, the alerts have defaults dialed in to ensure a reasonable threshold of novelty – a feature developed in response to client feedback.
Lastly, Eric offers his thoughts on the AI landscape and where the industry is headed in the future. Causality Link’s use of AI long predates the buzz of the past year and a half, and its co-founders have seen the waves of excitement and frustration that have come and gone. Eric states that the future has become a little murkier in terms of what the “interplay between man and machine” might be, but at the same time, the industry saw much pushback due to generative AI hallucinations and other problems inherent to AI systems. He also brings up the challenges of building a large language model from scratch and predicts there will be a “race to the bottom” when it comes to system pricing, accuracy and explainability. Overall, he describes AI as a technology that provides substantial value, but will continue to serve as a “copilot” to human functions, rather than replace them – for now.
See below for a breakdown of what was discussed. Happy listening!
Timestamps:
1:35 – How Causality Link’s alerts functionality works
10:30 – The users and sectors that will benefit most
12:15 – Interacting with the platform and receiving alerts
18:10 – The AI state of AI today and where we go from here
