3 ms·

Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it

by jalev 4mo ago

Unfortunately every software related industry is embracing LLM/Codegen. Your banks, fintechs, insurance. Everyone. Your concerns are the same I'm having, yet it's regularly dismissed or hand-waved away as "don't worry about it the delivery velocity/ROI is worth it"

Hamuko 4mo ago
Are banks that concerned about velocity? Because moving fast and breaking things in the banking sector can get extremely expensive. It's also not a who-gives-a-shit industry like operating a taxi service or hosting images, but a very tightly regulated sector.
- jalev 4mo ago
  I might have been a bit broad with the brush. I can't speak for banks, but I can speak for the the fintech/money-movement space (e.g. Remitly, Wise, Revolut). It's a race to get first-to-market for backend integrations/features. It's given rise to a culture of "move fast break things" where safety is only for some core features, but absolutely not for the constellation of other services we provide. Failure rates have increased almost a percentage point since Codegen/LLM adoption was mandated from up top. You would think regulators would be on top of this, but our industry runs on all actors "self reporting" their outages. Most don't unless they can't hide it (>1h)
- mrkeen 4mo ago
  'Keeping up with regulations' may as well be a separate field from the core stuff. It has the same pressures as any other development effort. Managers will want the integration to the KYC service LLM'd as quickly as possible.
- bigthymer 4mo ago
  > Are banks that concerned about velocity? Yes
  - hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
    Not in the universe where I live. Having worked in a variety of web tech, and then working at a fintech with a partner bank, traditional banks move incredibly slow compared to nearly every other tech company out there, and for good reason.
simon84 4mo ago
It's not so much about velocity or quality, both of which LLM do (or will) provide. The real question is about accountability and liability. When a major data leak is going to happen, who will they sue or fire ? That is the value engineers provide. They understand, confirm, and take ownership.
- jalev 4mo ago
  This is what I'm wondering too. We've signed a confidentiality agreement with all the big players (as I'm sure all other companies have done), which is supposed to ensure our data is both segregated and not used for training. I don't trust these companies not to do just that; their business is in taking what we have and training their models.
  - iterateoften 4mo ago
    Yeah, I always wonder if they do some type of obfuscation and transformation on the private data and find a way to backdoor the info without technically using it directly.
  - afro88 4mo ago
    I wonder if there's a way to include data that's so unique you can prove it was trained on and sue later
    - Chu4eeno 4mo ago
      Unique data like that is unlikely to have any impact on the learned/final weights after training. SGD, Adam and the other hillclimbing solvers abhor jagged edges from "novel" trade secrets and the like. Unless it turns out everyone had the same secret genius idea (and it became a pattern to learn).
- lanfeust6 4mo ago
  Ostensibly, due-diligence should not change. But people are lazy, just as they've always been around testing/QA/definition-of-done. I'm not even certain that laziness gets them further along than it used to; I think it's that people have not had their overconfidence painfully corrected yet. Behaviors will re-align pretty fast when people realize that no, they're not going to get away with just pressing a button and saying everything is "good". That is happening right now.
sensanaty 4mo ago
I work in a large, established fintech and we're in no rush to shove LLMs everywhere. We have access to all the AI tooling we'd ever need with basically no limits, but AI or not, you're responsible for what you ship, so most people are less YOLO about the whole thing. From the quarterly surveys, most people in the co view it as a slight productivity boost but nothing dramatic, and most features we're releasing are still human reviewed anyways.

by jalev 4mo ago

Hamuko 4mo ago

Are banks that concerned about velocity? Because moving fast and breaking things in the banking sector can get extremely expensive. It's also not a who-gives-a-shit industry like operating a taxi service or hosting images, but a very tightly regulated sector.

jalev 4mo ago
I might have been a bit broad with the brush. I can't speak for banks, but I can speak for the the fintech/money-movement space (e.g. Remitly, Wise, Revolut). It's a race to get first-to-market for backend integrations/features. It's given rise to a culture of "move fast break things" where safety is only for some core features, but absolutely not for the constellation of other services we provide. Failure rates have increased almost a percentage point since Codegen/LLM adoption was mandated from up top. You would think regulators would be on top of this, but our industry runs on all actors "self reporting" their outages. Most don't unless they can't hide it (>1h)
mrkeen 4mo ago
'Keeping up with regulations' may as well be a separate field from the core stuff. It has the same pressures as any other development effort. Managers will want the integration to the KYC service LLM'd as quickly as possible.
bigthymer 4mo ago
> Are banks that concerned about velocity? Yes
- hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
  Not in the universe where I live. Having worked in a variety of web tech, and then working at a fintech with a partner bank, traditional banks move incredibly slow compared to nearly every other tech company out there, and for good reason.

simon84 4mo ago

It's not so much about velocity or quality, both of which LLM do (or will) provide. The real question is about accountability and liability. When a major data leak is going to happen, who will they sue or fire ? That is the value engineers provide. They understand, confirm, and take ownership.

jalev 4mo ago
This is what I'm wondering too. We've signed a confidentiality agreement with all the big players (as I'm sure all other companies have done), which is supposed to ensure our data is both segregated and not used for training. I don't trust these companies not to do just that; their business is in taking what we have and training their models.
- iterateoften 4mo ago
  Yeah, I always wonder if they do some type of obfuscation and transformation on the private data and find a way to backdoor the info without technically using it directly.
- afro88 4mo ago
  I wonder if there's a way to include data that's so unique you can prove it was trained on and sue later
  - Chu4eeno 4mo ago
    Unique data like that is unlikely to have any impact on the learned/final weights after training. SGD, Adam and the other hillclimbing solvers abhor jagged edges from "novel" trade secrets and the like. Unless it turns out everyone had the same secret genius idea (and it became a pattern to learn).
lanfeust6 4mo ago
Ostensibly, due-diligence should not change. But people are lazy, just as they've always been around testing/QA/definition-of-done. I'm not even certain that laziness gets them further along than it used to; I think it's that people have not had their overconfidence painfully corrected yet. Behaviors will re-align pretty fast when people realize that no, they're not going to get away with just pressing a button and saying everything is "good". That is happening right now.

sensanaty 4mo ago

I work in a large, established fintech and we're in no rush to shove LLMs everywhere. We have access to all the AI tooling we'd ever need with basically no limits, but AI or not, you're responsible for what you ship, so most people are less YOLO about the whole thing. From the quarterly surveys, most people in the co view it as a slight productivity boost but nothing dramatic, and most features we're releasing are still human reviewed anyways.