Adam Torres and Richard Rothenberg discuss FII PRIORITY.
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Show Notes:
Listen to FII PRIORITY coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres and Richard Rothenberg, CEO at Global A.I. Corp, explore the future of AI and FII PRIORITY.
About Richard Rothenberg
Richard Rothenberg’s interest in the SDGs originated from his work as a research affiliate at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab where he helped the US Government better understand the systemic risks associated with the Flash Crash and potential spillovers across other other areas in different geographies.
Later on, after working on Global Multi-asset algorithmic strategies at Deutsche Bank and projects at the US Dept of Defense analyzing systemic risks and contagion mechanisms that can impact financial stability (DARPA), he realized that the UN SDGs can be used as a framework of non-financial risk factors for policy and investment purposes at the sovereign and private sector levels.
Given his keen interest in the SDGs which intersected with his personal interests on sustainable development, policy and the environment he co-founded Global AI. His goal is to leverage Big Data and AI to enable SDG-aligned capital mobilization and the advancement of the SDGs
About Global AI
Global AI is a Big Data company leveraging advanced statistical Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing to deliver cutting-edge solutions. Serving institutional investors, corporations across industries, governments, and multilateral international organizations, Global AI transforms complex data into actionable insights that drive smarter decision-making at scale.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on BR Guest to apply. All right, so today we are recording an episode with Richard Rothenberg. He is the. CEO over at Global AI Corporation.
And this is part of our FII Priority Miami series, where we’ve been featuring different participants in the FII institute’s summits and, man, I’ve been having a lot of fun. This is my first year being introduced to FII Institute and had some great guests on. And first off, Richard, I just wanna say welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure to be here. So Richard. As I mentioned I’m a newbie to the FII institute and to the community as a whole. I understand based on some of our previous conversations like you’ve been following for some time, maybe let’s start the conversation there. , what drew you to the institute?
Yeah, so the institute is very unique in the sense that, first event I attended was in, Brazil, in Sao Paulo. Mm-hmm. Last year. And it was, in my opinion, one of the leading events I put together, not just. People from the private sector mm-hmm. You know, top CCOs and from world class banks and corporations, but also ministers the president of the country was there.
Mm-hmm. As well as other former presidents. And I think it had a very unique perspective on emerging markets in the global south in general. And I believe it’s a great counter violence to the World Economic Forum, which is. Mostly focus on the global North G seven and I think that’s very unique and I would say it’s one of the top events out there in my opinion.
Hmm. What were some of your favorite? You were at the Miami of MI, right? Yeah. I was there as well. Yeah. Yeah. Those that were unable to attend? Or, just kind of curious about what, one of these events are? Like, what are from some of your favorite moments or just things from the event.
Well, first of all, I think , the attendance of president Trump and was significant given that he doesn’t mm-hmm. Regularly attend events and then. You know, having major decision makers as like Elon Musk and mm-hmm. And, the pharmacy of Google and others was really nice to see that attendance.
And I saw many others in the audience as well. Hmm. From the US administration and also from top sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East and, the US and especially in the hedge fund space in the us. Mm-hmm. People see us from Bridgewater. Citadel and some of the biggest names out there.
Hmm. And yeah, I think this is, very unique to see that in a, in a conference. Yeah, I was pretty blown away. I didn’t get in to see the president. I tried I was in line elsewhere. I was like 30 people away. I’m like, come on. I was like 30 people away. They’re like, Nope, you’re cut off.
I’m like, well, there you go. There goes my media badge. Right. It was all good. So I went to the media. Yeah. I went to the media room and I was just, I was watching in this big amazing theater they had for us. It was awesome. Oh, man. So let’s, switch it up a little bit. I wanna know a little bit more about, your company.
So maybe, start there, tell us a little bit more about global ai. Absolutely. So actually the origins of global ai originated being a think tank first. It started as a group of scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It’s one of the world’s largest super competing labs.
Mm-hmm. Under the Department of Energy. Is actually where the cyclotron started the first the Manhattan Project was one of first last so it has a long history and we were a group of people convened by, a top Harvard physicist do online Webber to work on the flash crash, which was a major event of 2010, that basically the market went down 10% in 10 minutes and it was a major national security issue.
And yeah, people working on their high frequency space, you know, came together and at the time, the government didn’t have the resources to address these systemic issues then. Basically at the time I was a half frequency trade at Deutsche Bank and other practitioners from top hedge funds and investment banks came together and held the government and later on the Federal Reserve to work on this issue.
And then later on worked with the United Nations and we saw a big demand at the intersection of big data, ai and, . Global finance and another major issues, and therefore we decided to create also a company to complement the company. And yet to this date we’ve addressed major issues that involve also the global south meaning like address global sustainable issues, global financial issues, and, also major innovations in terms of natural processing.
LLM and big data, the state of the art. Mm-hmm. And I’ve been part also originally at the AI conclave by the I priority, which is a group that brings together experts and has a unique perspective on the global south. Mm-hmm. And this is something I have not seen at any other gathering, even when I was a doubles earlier this year.
There was no such thing like an AI focused on the global south and emerging markets. And I think that was a very unique contribution that the FI brings and that I’m happy to be part of. Hmm. Let’s talk a little bit more about ai, like , how is AI currently being leveraged to maybe address some of the systemic challenges that you’re seeing maybe in, in sustainable finance?
Yes. So. One of the ways in which it’s addressed at the systemic level. So one example relates to ESG or sustainable finance. Mm-hmm. So essentially the way companies evaluate portfolios and there’s something called green washing, for example. Mm-hmm. Where companies report. You know, basically only where they thing, areas where they look good and they don’t report things where they look bad.
Hmm. So from that perspective, AI has been useful to basically web scrap and, gather data from not just the company, but also news NGOs local people on the ground. If say a company has operations in various countries. And source local news in, the local language. So for example, one company we analyze in South America, we found that 70% of the relevant information was in Spanish in local sources in terms of negative issues in E, s, and G, like environmental source and governance.
Mm-hmm. And this, a lot of this information either did not arrive or there was a major lag in arriving to mainstream sources. Like Bloomberg or New York Times. Mm-hmm. And such. So this time delay these geo tagging that AI allows and multi-language capability and timeliness basically enables investors, sustainable investors, impact investors to better assess risks, you know, generate.
Alpha because they can react faster to opportunities and risks and basically be able to have a larger impact. Hmm. In the market with the positive foot? What kind of trends are you following right now? I’m curious. I mean, based on how long you’ve been in this industry, you’re, obviously, you know, at top conferences, like, FII and, you’re having these conversations daily.
What, kind of trends are you following and, or let’s just say excite you? Yeah. Some of the things that excite me are, new trends in, for example, one of them is a agent TKIs. Mm. So I’m actually working on a, collaborating on a book precise on this topic that we released later this year.
We’re a co-author who’s a Dr. Ger. It was very renowned professor from the Columbia University and NYU, the topic of machine learning. And essentially we are looking at new types of ai. A lot of people are familiar with GPT. Mm-hmm. But when you use things like that, it has a very limited memory and context.
And now we start to see things like deep seek and others that can things a few steps ahead. So basically we excited about the new wave of AI that are gonna come out, that basically gonna involve not only something called chain of thought, which is basically almost imagine an algorithm playing chess.
That can analyze things several steps ahead and the probabilities of each step ahead, and then make probabilistic decisions in the real time based on the new information as it arrives. Hmm. And then also the multi multimodality is gonna enable much more context. So it’s not just gonna be text, but also vision.
And also with the robotic configurations also physical inputs. And when you combine this with the ability to connect to, human interfaces. Mm-hmm. And by that I mean your phone, your computer, your, bank account. So basically the AI are gonna be able , to perform any function the human do.
Mm-hmm. Also replicate the voice. Perform transactions ultimately with more and more automation as, as the learning rate increases and their error rate diminishes, trust is gonna, you know, take over and right now I see adoption being very slow in the industry overall. Mm-hmm. Even the opportunity is very big news, you know, a little bit make it look a little bigger than it is because Yeah.
It’s a little boss. I also still very limited. Yeah. You know, as you know so there’s privacy issues and ma many other challenges, limited data. Mm-hmm. So. I believe that the next five years as these challenges start to get overcome, we’re gonna see a major, major transformation across all, you know, key critical industries.
Mm-hmm. I believe that this can be for good. We shouldn’t be fearing, you know, or just being replaced, but I would say enhanced. Mm-hmm. Maybe augment it. Mm-hmm. We can do more with less and probably even work less hours. You know it be increased productivity and economic numbers go up. So that’s one scenario.
Obviously it’s not, I’m not saying yeah, it can be go bad as well, but yeah. Yeah. Trying to stay positive and, and I think that’s one direction that people are not talking enough. Everybody’s thinking of Terminator. I don’t think that’s the only scenario mm-hmm. That I ask for. Good. And then that’s promising.
Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about the infrastructure investment gap. How can AI help bridge the infrastructure investment gap in developing countries? Like what does that look like to you? Oh, yeah, precisely. So being part of various discussions on this topic general Nations and G 20, and essentially we see major challenges in terms of.
Data gaps and transparency. Mm-hmm. And essentially when you go to an emerging country, there’s risks that you need to consider that are not present in major markets. Mm-hmm. Like you start to look at the country risk, the project risk, the currency risk, political risk, and other risks that are hard to quantify typically are analyzed manually, you know, by coco experts mm-hmm.
Which are very limited. So this creates a bottleneck, but with the help of ai, a lot of these nonstructural noisy data can be extracted quantified and analyzed in a systematic manner. Basically we see as an area where many of the gaps that exist today are gonna be filled with either real data or proxies.
And machines will help collect, systematically collect the data. As well that’s missing in a way that doesn’t involve humans, but it can be done, you know with agents, with AI agents. And so this can rapidly increment the information available and reduce the data gaps so that investors can make better.
Risk, return, impact decisions. Mm-hmm. So basically it’s gonna, in when we look at return, it’s gonna better assess potential returns, also risks, and also impact in terms of sustainability. As, as mentioned earlier, it can uncover hidden risks and information based on the local data and not traditional sources on a large scale.
And the, and the deeper you go into emerging markets, the more this is the stronger this is the case, especially like in Southwest. Mm-hmm. So Africa, you know, in the Sub-Saharan African, Southeast Asian, poorer countries that major, that gaps, that’s where the most impacts gonna be.
Mm-hmm.
On the application case today, we live in a world where many of the finance is still in the, I call the eighties, you know, still, we’re still looking very old school map models. Mm-hmm. Like name variants and you know, things like factor model are kind of like cutting edge, but AI again, is only being adopted by very few players, like only the top point hash funds in the world.
And this is gonna become more you know, mainstream across different players and ultimately is gonna enable to process more information faster, better, and basically tilt the balance. Towards more capital they invest in emerging markets. ’cause right now people are basically scared and, there’s no data.
Mm-hmm. So if we have models that can better assess risk and can better uncover opportunities, more capital is gonna naturally flow. And I think we were gonna see, major opportunities in uncover and basically major infrastructure projects being funded that are currently, that are bankable and currently not being funded.
Mm. And I, that’s gonna be very good for millions of people that, you know, water pro power mm-hmm. Renewables and other key industries, critical minerals and, other areas. Well, Richard, this has been great having you on the show today and learning more about, of course, your company which is originally started as a think tank, but also, you know, your work.
That being said, if somebody’s listening or watching this and if they wanna continue the dialogue or to continue to follow your work or learn more, how do they do that? Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we’re available. My email is rr at global ai dot. And we also have our ton website, which is global ai.org.
And I’m also maintain Richard Rottenberg global ai. Happy to please feel free to reach out. Happy to share more views and, thoughts on these important topics that happen today. Put the on the eye. Perfect. Wonderful for to you listening. Just so you know, we’ll definitely put some contact information in the show notes.
And if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button.
And Richard, thanks again for coming on the show. No, thank you so much for the invitation. It was a pleasure. Looking forward to listen to.
