did you share some of your thoughts on artificial intelligence potentially replacing financial services jobs yeah so I think that most financial services jobs are sales oriented they are if you were kind of trading floor you work in sales if you’re the CEO of any financial services
company or any company for that matter your sales person and if you’re an investment banker in order to make it to the top you have to be a great salesperson because what happens is you have to make great relationships with CEOs and fortune 500 companies and global companies in order to get
that business and so I don’t think that artificial intelligence will ever outsource sales entirely because sales is about relationship and not product knowledge technology is very good at product knowledge but it’s very binary like that guy data from Star Trek new generations so I think
that the roles within financial services that eventually we’ll get to Center mediator or a place by technology include the ones where it’s a very manual process like trading not all traders but most trading positions so what people call it execution trading now and basically computers
can do that you set the limit order call options strike price whatever it is and computers will do it for you we all do it when we transact online anyway so I think that a lot of technology jobs or technology a processor and take over the trading function but sales will never be outsourced in terms
of picking stocks there are some companies that do quite well by creating these these big black box a Linux server farm so to speak so for example Renaissance technologies which is an amazing amazing hedge fund it’s founded by this brilliant guy Jim Simmons and his son who actually lives out
here in Berkeley they have an office here as well in California and what they do is they make 30 or 40 percent every single year almost every year almost every a and they have a couple thousand computers or Linux servers running in a datacenter and they pick stocks based on different inputs for
example and they’d never tell us what their inputs are or how their algorithm works in that black box but for example let’s say it’s forecast to rain a lot or it has rained a lot this month then restaurant stocks will probably not do as well because people don’t go out as
often especially for lunch while they’re working to eat if it’s raining and so these black box trading algorithms are really really tough to master and there’s only a handful of companies that have done it correctly in the world Goldman Sachs had this product called the the alpha
font which is similar to rank sauce and they do something commensurate as well and they do well as well the only issue with these black box trading systems is yes they can pick stocks for you but they cannot read a management team you know and you know if you’re talking to the CEO in a public
forum and the CEO is usually really upbeat and she or he is is kind of negative I want to ask certain questions then what happens is it might indicate it might that business is not going that well and computers can’t really understand that yet one day they’ll be able to but not at this
point and so the bottom line is I think that trading jobs will be outsourced to technology and you’ll see more artificial intelligence based trading algorithms going forward as well now there’s two sectors that haven’t really been disintermediated or disrupted by technology as
much as others yeah one is financial services and the other one is healthcare because they’re both heavily regulated Industries well thank goodness we’re starting to see now a
lot of innovation in those sectors especially the FinTech or financial technology sector I used to be on the advisory board of a large angel investment firm here bootcamp picking FinTech companies the name of that company that picked those companies to invest in was plug-and-play Tech Center and
basically a lot of big banks are now partnering with angel or bootcamp organizations like plug-and-play tech Center in order to have them help them come up with new ideas or new startups to invest in from a tech perspective and so Citigroup for example does that they invest in in plug-and-play Tech
Center that that’s publicly close and Citigroup actually has a very big venture Capital division here in Palo Alto on University Street and so a lot of these banks are financial services companies are pouring billions of dollars every single year into R&D into coming up
with new FinTech ideas I’m sure a lot of that money is going to artificial intelligence based algorithmic R&D as well and so a lot of large banks like Wells Fargo and B of a spent about ten billion dollars that’s right every year on on technology and they have their own what are
called sandboxes internally in their companies where they’ll beta test cool new products and I think a large part of that in the future is going to be beta testing artificial intelligence based algorithms the last thing I’ll say about that is there’s a company that I invested in I
sold my stake recently called Palin’s here it’s still private and Palantir is now the largest employer here in Palo Alto they are in Facebook and what Palantir does is they solve the world’s biggest problems using complex algorithms and so what one of their products is called I
think it’s called metropolis I think so yeah and one of the weather products actually was used to help the Obama administration find Osama bin Laden and that product is actually also used to help financial services companies uncover vulnerabilities in their systems using artificial
intelligence big government’s use Palantir software as well for human trafficking in solving you know the war on drugs globally that sort of thing and so if you’re interested in learning more about artificial intelligence I think the poster child best company on the planet right now in
that area is a company called Palantir and if you have additional questions about that please let me know thanks as always
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Does accountant will be replace ?
Palantir has always been one of the most mysterious companies out there to me. Really cool that you were a private investor. Do you have any comments on their alleged involvement with Cambridge Analytica? or their influence on society through ways we might not see?
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