CeADAR expands free AI support for Irish businesses

CeADAR, Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI funded by Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland, has developed and released two new tools designed to help companies and researchers in the financial services sector to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into their businesses.

The first of these tools, called FinTalk, is a domain-specific dataset designed for the fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) with a focus on financial conversations. LLMs are the technology behind generative AI solutions like ChatGPT.

Extracted from public conversations on Reddit, the dataset is tagged with categories like Personal Finance, Financial Information and Public Sentiment.

FinTalk can improve AI’s understanding of financial topics and aid in the development of more informed and contextually aware financial chatbots or assistants.

The second tool, called FinanceConnect, is a state-of-the-art, open-source chat model tailored for finance and economic discussions. FinanceConnect enables the generation of finance-related content to professional standards.

FinTalk and FinanceConnect are freely available on CeADAR’s HuggingFace.

CeADAR’s aim is to build trust in AI and drive its adoption by Irish businesses while helping them to address ethical, security and regulatory concerns before they deploy generative AI.

Late last year, CeADAR released an initial set of four free tools to help businesses develop their AI capacity, and it is now in the process of developing tools to assist the AI research and developer community in evaluating and experimenting with LLMs.

FinTalk and FinanceConnect were developed in CeADAR by Dr Arsalan Shahid and his team of data scientists.

Technology Solutions Lead and Head of CeADAR Connect Group, Dr Arsalan Shahid said: 

“CeADAR is committed to providing Irish businesses with state-of-the-art resources to take full advantage of emerging technologies in AI as they become increasingly essential. These tools will help financial services companies to trial generative AI and ultimately improve their business offerings. 

“FinanceConnect has already got huge traction in the developer community, with over 5,000 downloads within the first month of its release. It has outperformed competing proprietary models like BloombergGPT in a number of benchmarks. These tools will empower financial services companies to embrace AI in a manner that aligns with the highest standards of trust and ethics that are essential when deploying the technology.”

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