The finance industry’s love of artificial intelligence has reached fever pitch — even in Europe, that traditional tech laggard. Beyond headline-grabbing announcements at HSBC Holdings Plc, or tin-eared ones from Standard Chartered Plc, ask any fund manager, banker or trader and you’re likely to hear stories of increasing adoption and experimentation.
Examples range from the humdrum to finance’s brainier realms: Compiling analyst recommendations into a personal automated rating system; training a chatbot in portfolio allocation ideas that don’t just give the same idea in three different ways; and the heavy lifting on writing code for whizzy quant traders.
Also read: JPMorgan rolls out AI tools in investment banking globally, senior banker says
But if there’s a catch right now, it’s cost. Supply constraints are pinching all parts of the AI ecosystem, particularly computing power. Users of Anthropic PBC’s popular AI assistant, Claude, are grumbling about soaring prices. Even Anthropic’s recent deal with SpaceX to increase its processing capacity hasn’t fully absorbed demand from its customers for expensive, computation-hungry tasks. Ergo, the price keeps going up.
Financiers’ gripes about the cost of Claude — a favorite for banker geeks — are starting to sound like those from the tech industry. The bill is on track to rise from tens of thousands of dollars for a single firm to several million.
Rampant demand from white-collar types is, of course, a good problem to have for companies like Anthropic who can impose price rises that might start to justify the AI industry’s epic losses and hype-fueled valuations. Dario Amodei’s company is on track for its first profitable quarter and is mulling a stock-market listing as early as October.
