AI, Money, and Mischief: Who’s Guarding the Guardrails
Are you also thinking the same as me?
If AI in current world is slowly but steadily—oops, sorry, let me reframe it—blazingly fast and headily engulfing everything in its way, how do we ensure safety and security around everything it touches? Unlike many technologies that flared up and ghosted us before the hype even had time to sip coffee, AI looks like it’s here to stay, and opening new doors with new use cases thats being uncovered day by day.
With models improving in its accuracy and latency, it looks more could be accomplished with less, if you know to use your time well (and don’t let Instagram eat it all).
Greenback - Fiat World
Perhaps, the most important invention to solve basic human need to exchange value in terms of product and services(aka buying snacks without bartering goats) is green back, the money. We built institutions called Banks, to manage the money and its many spinoffs. It is massively integral part of civilized human life today is an understatement.
Then, humans being humans, we invented increasingly complex financial products- stocks, bonds, mutual funds, hedge funds, and basically every other "fund" that makes you wonder if you should’ve taken that finance elective in college. I can’t help but wonder why would we need to understand so many complicated, nuanced, interrelated money terms to lead a very simple human life, more often than not blurring the lines of ambition and greed.
You see Ambitious and Greed are two different things I would say. Ambitious ppl do more of right things to make right money.Greedy People do more of edgy things to make the wrong money. (Spoiler: it rarely ends well).Now ppl started thinking , How to come up with systems to prevent right money becoming wrong money?
Naturally, that is where, trust and security around financial products got developed. Without them, the whole system crumbles faster than FTX in 2022.
Enter AI
Now with AI (and its ambitious cousin AGI) developing at supersonic speed, the big question is: how can we use AI to secure financial products without accidentally teaching it to short our portfolio?
Two key focus areas:
Make AI safe.
Use safe AI to keep our financial systems safe.
Most financial institutions are actively exploring both. Here’s the simple framework often used to build these systems:
Get a base model – typically from open-source communities (think LLaMA, Falcon, Mistral, etc.).
Add guardrails – alignment layers, safety filters, compliance checks.
Collect transactional data – anonymized but structured.
Convert transactions into NLP format & label – e.g., “transfer to Bahamas account → potential fraud.”
Train using supervised learning.
Develop eval sets – stress tests for different scenarios.
Create feedback loops – reinforcement learning keeps it sharp and less likely to “hallucinate fraud where none exists.”
Once you’ve got that, you can spin off sub-models:
Fraud & Alert Model (catch shady stuff fast)
Behavior Prediction Model (spot odd account activity)
Customer Agent Support Model (AI that doesn’t sound like a grumpy IVR system)
Stock/Financial Product Prediction Model (though let’s be real, this one should come with a “not financial advice” warning).
Crypto World
And now, the million-Bitcoin question: what about crypto?
Ever wondered what’s happening in crypto land when AI enters the chat? With governments slowly warming up to digital currencies (translation: figuring out how to tax them), safety is once again front and center. The challenge: crypto is borderless, fast-moving, and less regulated than banks—so AI safety and monitoring will play an even bigger role here.
But let’s not go down that rabbit hole just yet. We’ll explore the intersection of AI safety and crypto security in the next blog.
Until then, may your wallets stay safe and your algorithms less moody than LLMs on a Monday. Have a good week everyone. :)
