9 posts tagged with "LLM"

There is a vision that floats around about the fully autonomous bank, AI handling everything end to end, people barely in the loop. Having spent real time building with these tools and working through what it takes to govern them, I do not believe in that destination, and not only for the reasons people expect. The more useful question is not how autonomous a bank could become. It is where autonomy should stop, and why part of that line is permanent rather than just a limit of today's technology.

I have built enough with AI agents on my own projects to tell the demo magic apart from what actually holds up. The hype says agents will soon run everything. What I have found is narrower and more useful. They are very good at a specific shape of problem and unreliable outside it. So the interesting question for banking is not whether to use agents, but where they genuinely earn their place, and how to box them in so they stay useful.

The thing that finally made AI agents click for me was a small distinction. A chatbot can tell you how to reverse a fee. An agent can go reverse it. One explains the steps. The other takes them. Once I started playing with that on my own projects, the shift stopped feeling incremental and started feeling like a different category of tool.

When ChatGPT first showed up, I treated it like a magic trick. I'd throw prompts at it to see what it could do, marvel for a minute, and move on. Somewhere in the year and a half since, that changed without my really noticing. On my own projects, on my own time, these tools stopped being a novelty and became part of how I actually work. Not a thing I test. A thing I reach for.

The hardest part of using AI in banking is not the technology. It is figuring out where AI usage fits inside the vendor management discipline that banks already practice.

A year ago, ChatGPT showed up and changed the conversation. I've spent a lot of personal time since then digging into what these tools can actually do. My assumption going in was that everything would change overnight. What I've learned is more bounded, and more interesting, than that.

GPT-4 was released in March 2023, and I've had time since then to spend with it on personal projects, comparing it against 3.5. The difference is not subtle.

I've spent the last two months on personal time exploring ChatGPT, digging into how large language models work, and running it through every banking scenario I can think of. The wonder phase is fading. What's replacing it is a more practical question. Where could this eventually help at a community bank, and where would it get a bank in trouble?

After two weeks of playing with ChatGPT, I hit a point where "wow, it's good" wasn't enough. I wanted to understand what's actually happening when I type a prompt and get a coherent response. Not at a PhD level, but enough to move past treating it like a black box.