🧙🏼 Perplexity for finance

Howdy, wizards.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI today.

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1. Perplexity’s new features for finance

A couple of weeks ago I showed off some use cases on how companies are using AI in finance. Companies are increasingly getting confident on LLMs’ ability to retrieve accurate financial data in real-time.

Perplexity is now taking yet another stab at Google, with some impressive new features for financial research. In case you missed it, Perplexity is an AI assistant – infamous for being blazing fast, optimized for search, and plagiarising content.

When you search for a stock e.g. Nvidia, you now get an interactive dashboard with real-time stock quotes, detailed financial statements, and of course, you can customize charts by typing in plain English.

It also works for company financials, so you can check out revenue, profits, tax, etc. The information and charts adapts to your questions, pulling data and visualisations together that would normally take a long time to compile manually. It’s also easy to view financial of multiple companies side by side, for example by typing “compare revenues of Nvidia, AMD and Intel”.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Perplexity just made basic financial research quite a bit easier. I think professional analysts, traders, etc will still use other tools but for quick analysis and the casual investor – this is probably very helpful.

Google does provide similar information, but you often have to click through to Google Finance, navigate multiple pages, and you can’t use natural language to get instant visualizations and comparisons on the fly like this. If this catches on, I’m expecting other AI companies, at the very least Google, to follow suit, with their own similar features.

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2. Five real-world use cases of AI in education

AI is used a lot in education and, as it turns out, not only for students turning their lectures into flashcards (amazing use case, btw). I’ve touched on this not long ago when I linked to the case study of how Arizona State University is using ChatGPT and custom GPTs.

Here’s 5 recent real-world use cases I’ve found—from around the world—of education companies making their teaching work easier and learning more accessible with the help of AI:

• FoondaMate, a study helper for middle & high school students in emerging markets, uses Meta's Llama to power its AI study buddy available on WhatsApp and Messenger. It answers questions on various subjects, adapts to different English levels and uses multi-step guidance. The platform currently has 3 million students across South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria – and report 30% uplift in university eligibility for their users. SOURCE

• Arivihan, an online learning platform in India, uses Meta’s Llama to generate personalized answers, as well as lectures, for students. It has so far answered over 100,000 queries and checked 6,000+ subjective answers — with 82% accuracy. SOURCE

• Arco Educação, a Brazilian company focused on educational solutions, uses OpenAI's GPT models to reduce administrative workload for teachers – allowing them to focus more on each student. Their "Teacher Assistant" tool helps teachers with lesson planning, particularly for students with learning challenges like autism, ADHD and dyslexia. SOURCE

• Upeo Labs, a Kenyan AI startup, leverages Meta's Llama 3.1 for Somo-GPT, a teaching assistant that digitizes Kenya’s national curriculum, with conversational assistance across subjects like biology, history, and mental health. It’s currently in closed beta at 500 high schools, and used by students, teachers and parents. SOURCE

• Zelma, powered by OpenAI’s GPT models, makes education data accessible to parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers across the U.S. It integrates standardized test data, giving insights on student performance in ELA and math. Zelma uses function calling to generate visual data displays and provides SQL logic for verification. It also makes all questions public to facilitate learning from others. SOURCE

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ AI is quickly making learning faster, cheaper and more tailored to invidual needs. Seeing these use cases and some of the preliminary results, I can’t help but be bullish on AI for personalised education.

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