A December showcase of new technology from MindsDB partner companies promises to shake up the landscape of financial analysis.

The event, The New FinAI Tech Stack, included demos from powerhouse open-source AI organizations who are developing a framework for financial analysis that uses AI to outperform traditional methods—while championing collaboration and user control. (See the full event recording here.)

LangChain Cofounder Harrison Chase speaking at MindsDB HQ on December 5.

Highlights included a debut of the open-source OpenBB Terminal, along with a remarkable demonstration by Nixtla showing how its TimeGPT model exploits the systemic biases of equity analysts.

‍Speaker lineup:

• Jorge Torres, Cofounder and CEO of MindsDB

• Didier Lopes, Founder and CEO of OpenBB

• Max Mergenthaler, CEO, and Azul Ramirez, CTO, of Nixtla

• Harrison Chase, Cofounder and CEO of Langchain

• Jerry Liu, Cofounder and CEO of LlamaIndex

OpenBB Founder and CEO Didier Lopes.

OpenBB Terminal: A paradigm shift

→ OpenBB is an open-source investment research company used by investors, analysts, stock traders, and others.

Developer and OpenBB founder Didier Lopes used the December event as a rollout for his company’s OpenBB Terminal, which takes a leap forward from a Bloomberg Terminal while offering many of the same capabilities.

OpenBB’s terminal is the first-ever free and fully open-source financial terminal. It has an impressive arsenal of more than 600 commands, and gives users access to a vast array of financial domains, including equity, options, crypto, forex, macroeconomy, fixed income, and alternative datasets.

The OpenBB Terminal is the first fully open-source financial terminal.

Automation takes center stage with the Open BB Terminal, transforming labor-intensive investment research into a streamlined and repeatable process. This paves the way for others— ranging from academics to investment firms—to ensure consistent outputs across different individuals and machines.

Want a quick summary of Tesla’s recent appearances in the news? Or a comparison chart showing Tesla stock performance compared to competitors over time? It’ll be in the OpenBB Terminal dashboard.

Harrison Chase of LangChain.

Langchain: Debugging intelligence with Langsmith

→ Langchain is a platform for developing applications powered by large language models, with an emphasis on debugging.

The event also featured Langchain's Langsmith, a debugger tailored for production-grade LLM applications. LangSmith facilitates the debugging, testing, evaluation, and monitoring of chains and intelligent agents built on any LLM framework.

CEO Harrison Chase demonstrated the new product’s seamless integration with LangChain, and how it works with an agent like the OpenBB Terminal. Ultimately, LangSmith brings the performance of prompts, chains, and agents up to a level where they’re reliable enough to be used in production at large companies.

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Nixtla CEO Max Mergenthaler.

Nixtla: Revolutionizing time-series research with TimeGPT

→ Nixtla is a time-series research and deployment company offering state-of-the-art forecasting tools.

Earlier this year, Nixtla launched TimeGPT, a generative AI model for time-series events.

Now, a few months later, Nixtla CEO Max Mergenthaler, along with CTO Azul Ramirez and their team, are using TimeGPT to outpace some of the smartest Wall Streeters: equity analysts.

Nixtla's CTO Azul Garza Ramirez.

Nixtla partnered with NYU professor Roberto Gomez Cram to see if they could use the model to understand and exploit systemic biases in analysts' predictions. Using earnings call data, the team found errors showing up in patterns over time in the human analysts’ predictions. By viewing those errors as inputs, TimeGPT could then beat the analysts’ overall revenue forecasts by as much as 12%.

It means TimeGPT will be an extremely cost-effective and ultra-accurate approach to financial forecasting, leaving traditional forecasters in the dust.

LlamaIndex CEO and Cofounder Jerry Liu.

LlamaIndex: Simplifying complex finance questions

→ LLamaIndex provides a high-level API that facilitates straightforward querying

LlamaIndex showcased the simplicity of answering complex questions using LLM apps.

Need to analyze hundreds or thousands of SEC documents? LlamaIndex has you covered.

(Check out their open-source SEC project here). Importantly, LlamaIndex lets you do this using natural-language questions, and translates those questions into commands that a wide range of open-source systems can comprehend.

MindsDB's CEO and Cofounder Jorge Torres.

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MindsDB: Orchestrating Intelligence

→ MindsDB is an end-to-end AI platform for developers. It connects real-time data and AI/ML models, providing tools and automation that let developers build, launch and maintain AI-powered applications efficiently.

MindsDB Cofounder and CEO Jorge Torres demonstrated the power of the company’s platform to pull every other tool in the showcase together seamlessly. Acting as an orchestration layer, MindsDB connected OpenBB, Langchain, LlamaIndex, and Nixtla using only simple SQL commands.

How did they pull off such a feat? Essentially, Torres’ team employs a myriad of opinionated integrations for all the services above: an agent with text-to-SQL skills, an openBB connection, a LLamaIndex knowledge base with a Chroma backend, and finally a Slack chatbot integration. Developers can do all this without writing a single line of Python and without any thought to deployment infrastructure.

With the MindsDB service running on Slack, a non-technical person can ask natural language questions and receive technically informed answers. Need to know the average price of Ethereum in 2023? Or the all-time high rate of Canadian dollars vs US dollars?

With MindsDB, you can ask that question of a Slack chatbot and magically get an accurate answer.

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The evening’s demos were a good reminder that it’s the dawn of a new era in financial analysis—one marked by openness, collaboration, and the collective use of powerful LLMs.

At the close of the demonstrations, OpenBB CEO Didier Lopes said it well: “The future is really nearby.”

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Check out the full livestream here. Click here to see our full roster of events at MindsDB HQ.

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