Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) has grown dramatically, but not everyone is convinced of their application in making life (or business) easy. than. The latest to raise doubts about their effectiveness is Nithin Kamath, the founder of Zerodha. While he himself did not give any comment on the use of AI and ML in the brokerage industry, he did share what the “behind the scenes” of his company – Kailash Nadh, chief technology officer at Zerodha – talked about this. Nadh said most claims of being “powered by AI” are “pure marketing and hogwash”.
Kamath tweeted he is constantly asked how or if Zerodha uses AI or ML and he goes on to say that he has “not found” any use cases yet. So Kamath decided to ask this question to Nadh and shared Nadh’s answer on Twitter.
Nadh says Zerodha does not use WHO or ML systems other than a commodity image recognition engine to process images during the presentation and the company has not encountered any problems. He also said that many brokers have publicly advertised “AI-powered” but none of them have reported any use. He added, this conclusion is based on Zerodha’s interaction with market regulator SEBI, which conducts a quarterly survey on AI or ML usage of all brokers in India.
“From my interactions with the industry, I’d actually be inclined to say that most of the claims of being ‘powered by AI’ are pure hogwash, hypermarketing. The vast majority of AI or ML usage, Nadh said, are commoditized tools that can be trivially used without even mentioning the ‘AI-powered’ powerful marketing.
I keep getting asked about how we use AI/ML/Blockchain at @zerodhaonlineand I keep saying we don’t have and haven’t found any use cases yet. This time I asked our man behind the scenes, Dr. K, to comment. Can’t help but share my reaction???? pic.twitter.com/IMEnnsWgBb
– Nithin Kamath (@ Nithin0dha) November 25, 2021
The CTO added in his note that the vast majority of all “AI-preferential thinking” in the industry are cases of “false assumptions, outright delusions, and often intellectual dishonesty.” Nadh also said he’s “very skeptical” of anything labeled “AI-powered”.
Zerodha is a large brokerage firm based in Bengaluru. It started operating in August 2010. The company’s name is a combination of 0 and “rodha”, the Sanskrit word for barrier.
