JPMorgan is developing an AI service similar to ChatGPT that provides investment advice

JPMorgan Chase is developing a software service similar to ChatGPT that relies on a disruptive form of artificial intelligence to select investments for clients, CNBC has learned.

The company filed to trademark a product called IndexGPT this month, according to a filing from the New York-based bank.

IndexGPT will take advantage of “cloud computing software that uses artificial intelligence” to “analyze and select stocks tailored to client needs,” according to the presentation.

The viral success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology last year has forced entire industries to grapple with the advent of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT, which uses mass language models to create human-sounding answers to questions, has ignited an arms race between tech giants and chipmakers over what is considered the next critical innovation.

The technology has a range of possible uses in finance. benches included Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley they have already started testing it for internal use. That includes ways to help Goldman engineers create code or respond to inquiries from Morgan Stanley financial advisers.

But JPMorgan may be the first financial incumbent looking to launch a GPT-like product directly to its clients, according to Josh Gerben, a Washington DC-based trademark attorney.

“This is a real indication that they might have a potential product to launch in the near future,” Gerben said.

“Companies like JPMorgan don’t just register trademarks for the fun of it,” he said. The filing includes “an affidavit from a corporate officer that essentially says, ‘Yes, we plan to use this trademark.'”

JPMorgan must launch IndexGPT within three years of approval to secure the trademark, according to the lawyer. Trademarks typically take nearly a year to be approved, thanks to delays at the US Patent and Trademark Office, he said.

The requests are often loosely written to give companies the broadest possible protections, Gerben said.

But the JPMorgan filing specifies that IndexGPT uses the same type of AI popularized by ChatGPT; the bank plans to use AI powered by “pretrained generative transformer (GPT) models.”

“It’s an artificial intelligence program to select financial stocks,” Gerben said. “This sounds to me like they are trying to put my financial adviser out of business.”

JPMorgan declined to comment for this article.

Financial advisers have long feared the advent of technology good enough to displace their role in the markets. Those fears have yet to largely materialize.

Wealth management firms, including Bank of America’s Morgan Stanley and Merrill, offer simple roboadvisor services, but that hasn’t stopped their human advisors from raking in billions more dollars in assets.

Earlier this week, JPMorgan executives touted their progress in applying AI across all operations at the company’s annual investor conference.

The bank, which employs 1,500 data scientists and machine learning engineers, is testing “a number of use cases” for the GPT technology, global technology chief Lori Beer said.

“We couldn’t talk about AI without mentioning GPT and extensive language models,” Beer said. “We have recognized the power and opportunity of these tools and are committed to exploring all the ways they can drive value for the business.”