Ant unveils AI language model for wealth management, insurance

Ant Group unveiled an artificial intelligence tool to use for wealth management and insurance services, joining the race for next-generation AI. 

The Jack Ma-backed fintech company will use its financial large language model to power two applications known as Zhixiaobao, which answers questions for customers, and Zhixiaozhu, an assistant for financial professionals, it said at the Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai. 

Chinese companies including Tencent Holdings and Baidu are competing to create their equivalent of ChatGPT. China approved the first batch of generative AI services for public rollout, marking a milestone for the budding industry, Bloomberg reported in August.  

Ant is also planning to use the large language model for market analysis, investor education, explaining insurance products and verifying claims. The system trained on hundreds of billions of token datasets that included Chinese financial documents and more than 1 trillion tokens from text document datasets.

The company also open sourced its AI-powered coding platform CodeFuse for developers. 

Ant has been conducting a closed test on Zhixiaobao 2.0 for about six months and will release it for public use after getting regulatory approval. Its Zhixiaozhu app is undergoing further tests.