Goldman Sachs CIO on How the Bank Is Actually Using AI

Joe Weisenthal (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios.

Tracy Alloway (0:04)

Podcasts, radio, news. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:23)

And I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:24)

Joe, what's been your favorite ChatGPT or Claude prompt so far?

Joe Weisenthal (0:31)

You know, it's funny because I have a lot of fun with them, and also I use them for serious things. So I'll like upload conference call transcripts and say, tell me what this company said about labor market indicators or something like that. And that will be extremely useful for that.

Tracy Alloway (0:47)

Wait, do you actually find that more efficient than just doing a word search for like labor or working? I don't. I hate uploading stuff because you can only do it in like fragments.

Marco Argenti (0:56)

No. What?

Joe Weisenthal (0:57)

Tracy. No. Let me, I'll show you how to prompt.

No, I get a lot of professional use out of the various AI tools, but I also have a lot of fun with them and there's even a song, and I'm not going to say which one that I wrote. I didn't use the lyrics. No, I did not, because it's very good.

Tracy Alloway (1:17)

Wait, what did you use? Did it give you an actual melody? What happened?

Joe Weisenthal (1:21)

No. There was a song that I liked, and the song title rested upon a pun. So I asked ChatGPT to come up with another song that had a similar twist based on the headline of that song. I needed basically a song prompt idea.

Tracy Alloway (1:43)

This opens up a whole can of worms. No, this is actually the perfect segue into what we're going to talk about today, because for you and I using something like a ChatGPT, we don't really have the same concerns that a proper company or large corporation would have. It doesn't really matter to us if the answer is wrong. I mean, ideally, we would like it to be correct, but if I'm just asking some silly question, it doesn't really matter what ChatGPT spits out at me. And also copyright kind of doesn't matter, so we don't care what it spits out in terms of who owns it. And also we don't care what we're putting in, in terms of who owns that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:22)

That's right.

Tracy Alloway (2:22)

But if you are a company, you are thinking about generative AI very differently.

Joe Weisenthal (2:28)

I just want to say one thing, which is that if I like-

Tracy Alloway (2:30)

In your defense, okay, defend yourself.

Joe Weisenthal (2:32)

No, no, I'm not even trying to defend myself. If I upload, say, the McDonald's earning transcript and I say, what does McDonald's say about the labor market? Then there's some quote. I always go back and check that that quote is actually in there. So I do-

Tracy Alloway (2:44)

Very good.

Joe Weisenthal (2:45)

I'm not just blindly relying on it. I do also do my own work and everything. But yeah, it's very true. So I can say I get tremendous amount of use from ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, and it is very useful to me. But it makes mistakes sometimes. If you think about deploying AI in the enterprise world, then maybe a 1 percent mistake rate or a 1 percent hallucination, or whatever you want to call them, is just completely unacceptable and a level of risk that makes it almost unusable for professional purposes.

Tracy Alloway (3:19)

Absolutely. Of course, the other thing with AI is there is still this ongoing very heated debate about how transformational it's actually going to be.

So you and I are using it as a productivity hack in some cases or maybe to generate song lyrics or even songs in some cases. But what is the true use case for this particular technology? There's still a lot of debate about that. And so I'm very pleased to say we do in fact have the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking to someone who is implementing AI at a very, very large financial institution. We're going to be speaking with Marco Argenti, the Chief Information Officer at Goldman Sachs. Marco, thank you so much for coming on Odd Lots.

Marco Argenti (4:04)

Thank you for having me.

Tracy Alloway (4:05)

Marco, tell us what a Chief Information Officer does at Goldman Sachs. Whenever I see CIO, I always think Chief Investment Officer as-

Marco Argenti (4:13)

Yeah, it's very confusing.

Tracy Alloway (4:14)

Yeah. So what does the other CIO do?

Marco Argenti (4:17)

So last week I was in Italy visiting my mother. She's 83 and she obviously doesn't know much about technology or banking. And so she said, what do you do at Goldman? And I said, I just try to simplify. I say, I make sure that the printers don't run out of paper. And interestingly, the CIO job has been traditionally associated with the word IT. And IT, I tell you, talk to any technologist, they don't want to be classified as IT.