In mid 2021, there was lots of excitement around the flexibility of large transformer models. I wanted to see if I could use GPT-J as an all-in-one news-based trading bot. The idea being, if the model has read enough of the internet as background, it should understand the context of a news article, and output a trading signal for a given company. Read the full paper PDF. Background Back in the dark ages (yes, I mean before Chat-GPT took the internet by storm), transformer-based text generation models were known only to AI researchers and the nerdiest of programmers. It took until the release of OpenAi’s GPT-2 in early 2019 before I joined the hype train. Like everyone else at the time, I wanted to co-opt the power of transformers for fun and profit, but alas OpenAi was only allowing other big-time researchers, or deep-pocketed corporations access to their groundbreaking technology. Thankfully in the meantime, Ben Wang and Aran Komatsuzaki were assembling a crack team of open-source gods to compete with OpenAI. Working at breakneck pace, they released GPT-J, a free and open competitor to GPT-2 and GPT-3 by early 2021, just in time for me to make use of their work in my senior research project for my college degree.
...