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Generative AI (GenAI) is a popular and powerful technology that can boost productivity and creativity in various domains. A research team at the HKUST Business School has developed InvestLM — Hong Kong’s first open-source large language model (LLM) for GenAI applications, capable of generating investment-related, human-like responses comparable to those of well-known commercial chatbots, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT. InvestLM’s model parameters and the insights from its development process have been made publicly available to support industry practitioners and researchers in deploying LLM-related technology.

The emergence of open-source LLMs has opened a new avenue for exploring the potential of GenAI, allowing those with moderate computing resources to train LLMs for their own needs. By adapting from LLaMA-65B, an open-source general-purpose LLM developed by Meta, with a high-quality and diverse set of finance and investment- related texts using a technique called instruction fine-tuning, the HKUST research team has developed InvestLM, a state-of-the-art LLM for the financial domain. InvestLM’s responses have been rated as comparable to those of state-of-the-art commercial LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Claude-2, by financial experts, such as hedge fund managers and research analysts. According to the research team, with its strong capabilities in understanding financial texts, InvestLM can potentially enhance the work efficiency of finance and investment professionals in tasks such as providing investment insights, extracting information from and summarizing financial news and reports.

Professor TAM Kan-Yan, Dean of HKUST Business School, said, “Developing LLMs in-house can help financial firms gain competitive edge through the application of generative AI, while retaining better control over proprietary information and customers’ data. Reflecting HKUST’s lead in embracing generative AI among tertiary education sector in Hong Kong, this project has provided valuable insights for the financial sector on leveraging the fast-growing field of generative AI, in addition to making a powerful financial LLM accessible to the public.”

Professor YANG Yi, Associate Professor of HKUST’s Department of Information Systems, Business Statistics and Operations Management, and a member of the research project team, said, “By offering our insights into fine-tuning a foundation model for financial text generation, we hope that InvestLM can serve as a useful reference for industry practitioners in the financial sector and beyond who want to unlock the power of generative AI.”