Revolutionizing AI at OpenBB with new leader, Michael Struwig
With the launch of the OpenBB Terminal Pro approaching, we're excited to announce the hiring of Michael Struwig, a Ph.D. with expertise in AI and quantitative finance. Michael will help us to further our AI capabilities, reinforcing our commitment to innovation in the open-source finance space.
AI will be one of the technologies that will be looked back in hundreds of years as revolutionary, changing how humans live.
With the upcoming launch of the OpenBB Terminal Pro, we believe AI can push the limits of the way users do investment research.
We believe our ecosystem is positioned at the forefront of finance in terms of investment research. With the inception of the OpenBB Terminal Pro, we are standing at the cusp of a significant leap. Our journey began with AskOBB, a tool that facilitated natural language interaction with financial data, but that was just the start.
Last month, I wrote a tweet explaining why we spent over $500,000 in revamping our core platform. We are committed to creating the best finance platform for quants/analysts to build with. Some key features are:
- We are data vendor agnostic - we enable them
- We are open source - everyone can contribute data
- We standardize data across close to 100 different data providers
- We put a lot of effort into our documentation
These features allow us to bring AI to our platform from the ground up, and think about how that will impact the user experience at the core level.
For instance this is an extension that James added to the OpenBB Platform.
There are a lot of products out there utilizing generative AI for finance. Most of these can be classified as:
- Startups built around a particular feature - e.g. chatting with news. With LLMs becoming a commodity, over time it will be easy to understand that this is a feature and not a product itself.
- Larger companies that put a small team together to explore generative AI to be seen as leaders in the space - but without an intention to bring such to market. Often because of outdated tech stack.
We are different. The OpenBB Terminal Pro is the most customizable investment research platform for teams of quants and analysts. It contains generative AI features, but these are embodied inside the app, and treated as part of the user experience.
Some examples below:
Most of these generative AI features have been started as side projects by our team members, and once we validated the use case with financial professionals we incorporated it into the roadmap. However, we want to double down on this effort and therefore we're excited to welcome Michael to OpenBB.
Michael has a PhD in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, has been doing AI for a few years, and prior to joining us was the CEO of Hudson & Thames Quantitative Research.
I first heard him from his reading groups:
From watching these videos it was clear that Michael is an expert in the field and was capable of understanding deep topics and not solely staying on the surface. So I was keen to have a chat with him. It turns out that he was a big supporter of OpenBB in particular due to our open-source approach to finance and the connection was immediate.
Michael met a few of our team members, and a week later we had a signed contract.
I couldn’t be more excited to welcome him to the team and see the amazing products we are going to build at OpenBB.
Here’s what Michael has to say about joining OpenBB:
"At OpenBB, I've discovered the perfect blend of my core passions: ML/AI, Opensource, and, more recently, quantitative finance. Joining the OpenBB team truly feels like a fairytale come true. I've never encountered a team so singularly-focused and driven. They genuinely "get it," and working alongside such talented individuals is incredibly inspiring. I'm ecstatic to be on board and am eager to help contribute to OpenBB's AI initiatives."
If you are excited about the field of open source, AI, and finance, and want to help - you can reach out to Michael on Twitter.