Building High-Performance AI Engineering Teams with Mike Conover, Co-founder & CEO of Brightwave
Sep 17, 2024
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Mike Conover, co-founder and CEO of Brightwave, dives into the challenges and capabilities of AI in financial research. He discusses limitations of large language models (LLMs) and the importance of effective information retrieval. Mike shares insights on building strong AI engineering teams and the significance of practical collaboration between analysts and engineers. He emphasizes the need for customized AI solutions to enhance product outcomes, illustrating how Brightwave revolutionizes market analysis.
Effective AI systems necessitate reliable measurement and continuous assessment to ensure quality and accuracy in financial research outputs.
Decomposing complex problems into manageable sub-tasks significantly enhances analysis clarity and output quality when leveraging Large Language Models.
Deep dives
Operationalizing Measurement for AI
To effectively operationalize artificial intelligence systems, it's essential to define a reliable set of measurements and continuously assess their accuracy. Unreliable measurement instruments can lead to significant issues in quality and efficacy. Iterative improvements can be made by observing the outcomes within a controlled environment, such as a playground or production setting. This tightening of the system's parameters, akin to a ratchet, gradually eliminates undesired outcomes, ensuring a more precise function.
The Role of LLMs in Financial Research
Large Language Models (LLMs) are utilized to assist financial analysts in synthesizing insights from vast amounts of data, offering capabilities beyond human cognitive limits. They can identify patterns across numerous documents, providing a more comprehensive understanding of complex subjects. Brightwave, for instance, deploys these models to generate actionable financial research by assimilating diverse perspectives and facilitating in-depth analysis of economic factors. This approach augments human analysts by allowing them to focus their attention on the AI's assessment of relevant information.
Decomposing Tasks for Better Outcomes
An effective strategy for leveraging LLMs involves decomposing complex problems into smaller, manageable sub-tasks to improve clarity and output quality. By treating independent text segments with focused analysis, the system can synthesize conclusions that achieve better results than when attempting to assess large texts in one context. This granular approach not only streamlines the reasoning process but also enhances the extraction of salient points from dense documents, such as SEC filings. Ultimately, this decomposition leads to a more refined insight generation process that distinguishes critical information from less relevant content.
Evaluating Quality in AI Outputs
Assessing the quality of AI-generated outputs involves developing a nuanced understanding of what constitutes effective analysis, rather than relying on subjective evaluations. Indicators of insightful content can be broken down into measurable sub-characteristics, guiding the evaluation process. Employing online evaluations helps verify the reliability of AI in producing meaningful insights while ensuring that expert human judgment informs the assessment criteria. This blend of qualitative judgment and structured evaluation ultimately enhances the overall quality of the outputs produced by the system.
In episode #2 of Deployed: The AI Product Podcast, we meet with Mike Conover, co-founder & CEO of Brightwave to discuss the capabilities and challenges of building AI systems for financial research. Brightwave is an AI research assistant for financial professionals. Their product generates insightful and trustworthy financial analyses on demand. We get into the details of what it takes to make Brightwave work well, and lessons learned along the way including:
Some of the limitations of LLMs, and what to do about them — especially when it comes to summarizing lots of content (tl;dr - long context windows don’t solve everything)
How they’ve developed their eval suite through a practical iteration process among in-house finance experts, product, and engineering
Thoughts on staffing AI engineering teams, including what he’s seen work to get strong software engineers up to speed working with LLMs
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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