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- ChatGPT would score around 80% submitting homework about markets, according to State Street's Matthew Bartolini.
- "ChatGPT would probably be a B-minus student… that's the surface level it gets," he told Bloomberg.
- Bartolini also broke down how he uses AI to help him to pick stocks for a fund that's up 11% year-to-date.
ChatGPT would score a "B-minus" if you assigned it homework about markets, according to a strategist who uses AI to help him pick stocks.
State Street managing director Matthew Bartolini said in an interview published Friday that the intelligent language bot can list surface-level investing knowledge but wouldn't score higher than 80% because it can't understand wider context.
"The first time I saw it, we were playing around with it — 'write us a blog post about the benefits of ETFs,' and it got it probably 80% correct in how we would want to structure the argument," he told Bloomberg's "What Goes Up" podcast.
"And that's where ChatGPT is, that it kind of gives you about an 80%," Bartolini added. "I was joking with some of my colleagues who have older kids that ChatGPT would probably be a B-minus student if it only ever turned in its homework because that's the surface level it gets."
ChatGPT can offer up surface-level investing advice – but only has access to data from 2021 or earlier, limiting its ability to apply that knowledge.
Academics have consistently warned that the language bot could print misinformation, and Morningstar CIO Dan Kemp told Insider last month that it isn't "helpful as an investment decision-making tool, either for professionals or laypeople."
Bartolini's interest in ChatGPT arose from using AI to help him pick stocks for State Street's SPDR S&P Kensho New Economies Composite exchange-traded fund since 2018.
He said he asks natural-language AI programs to scan through regulatory filings by mid- and small-cap companies in a bid to find little-known innovative stocks.
"It scans through regulatory documents searching for key terms to identify how these firms' material operations correlate back to areas of innovation, whether it's enterprise collaboration, clean energy, advanced transport systems, drones," Bartolini said.
"There can be some firms that are quite innovative, that are performing and producing some really interesting things within our economy — whether it's things within advanced healthcare-like wearables that aren't really covered by Wall Street analysts because they might be smaller-capitalization securities," he added.