Ant Group Launches Specialized Large Language Model for Finance Industry

Ant Group has launched a financial large language model (LLM) and two applications that it powers in the China market.

The financial LLM is a specialized language model that has been specifically fine-tuned for artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the financial services industry, the technology company said in a Friday (Sept. 8) press release.

It surpasses general-purpose LLMs in several key areas, including cognition, generation, domain knowledge, professional thinking and compliance, according to the press release. Ant Group’s in-house benchmark, Fin-Eval, has confirmed the performance of the LLM across various financial-specific tasks.

To achieve its performance, the financial LLM has been trained on an extensive dataset, which includes hundreds of billions of token datasets containing Chinese financial documents and over 1,000 billion tokens from general corpus datasets, the release said. Additionally, it has incorporated a dataset of more than 600,000 instructions from real-world industry use cases.

Ant Group’s financial LLM has the potential to power a wide range of professional services in the finance industry, per the release. These services encompass wealth management, such as financial product evaluation, market analysis and investor education, as well as insurance services, including explaining insurance products, creating family insurance plans and verifying insurance claims.

Ant Group intends to leverage the power of its financial LLM across all digital financial services in collaboration with institutions in the Chinese market, according to the press release. The company has also taken steps to promote industrial innovation by open-sourcing its AI-powered coding platform, CodeFuse, and making its financial-specific AI task benchmark, Fin-Eval, available to the public.

Two new applications have been introduced by Ant Group, both powered by the financial LLM, the release said. Zhixiaobao 2.0 serves as an intelligent financial assistant for consumers, offering services such as market analysis, portfolio diagnosis, asset allocation suggestions and investor education. The other application, Zhixiaozhu 1.0, is an intelligent business assistant catering to financial industry professionals, providing support for tasks such as investment analysis, information extraction, content creation, business opportunity insights and financial tool utilization.

PYMNTS Intelligence has found that advanced AI technology is shaping a consumer banking future in which digital assistants not only listen but also understand and anticipate consumers’ needs.

Applications in the banking industry include chatbots, fraud protection and other tools designed for this sector, according to “AI and Banking’s New Dawn: From Conversations to Conversation,” a PYMNTS and Galileo collaboration.