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IB analyst/associate is a fake job to give 22 year olds a few years to learn some basic professionalism and finance skills. After a few years of polishing they move on to a somewhat more real job (real in the sense that they’re doing something with real-world consequences, not necessarily socially useful) like PE or more senior banker.
Banks provide this training for various reasons discussed downthread but it’s not surprising that as revenue decreases they start cutting back. They don’t want to announce to clients that they’ve been charging them to train Harvard grads with fancy finance jobs for even fancier finance jobs all this time, so instead they pretend it’s about AI. I am skeptical that LLMs are actually good at doing what junior bankers do, rather, what junior bankers do is close to pointless.
The classic IB/PE role/career track will definitely survive. I don’t think AI/LLM is very relevant to what a more senior person does. Junior roles are cyclical (related to the state of the economy, not AI developments). Back-office or support-type roles like IT will probably be most impacted for the same reason that these kinds of roles will be impacted economy-wide.
So it's an apprenticeship, and I think the problem will be that if you cut out the juniors and replace them by AI, where are the new seniors going to come from when the current lot retire/move on/die?
You haven't trained up the next generation of successors and if everyone has done the same thing by replacing the lower ranks with AI, you can't hire them on from elsewhere, either.
I think you're misunderstanding the process of AI development.
We've been focusing so hard on communicating to people that AI aren't human, that we've been glossing over how anthropomorphic this process actually is. Once the AI have fully internalized the low level skills that we teach to entry level human analysts, the same process that allows some of those low level human analysts grow into senior analysts, make the jobs of more senior analysts learnable to AI.
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LLMs are probably very good at doing what junior bankers do, since what they do is essentially running basic statistics on publicly available financial data (already categorized by the big financial data providers) and then adding some light commentary, charts and visuals for pitches. I remember using FactSet’s primitive auto pitchbook feature in 2014 or 2015 and thinking that this was a job that was going to be automated very soon. But you’re correct that that isn’t really the point.
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