This AI can detect sarcasm and tell you where to invest your cash

Sometime in the mid-2000s, hedge fund owners got an idea. Financial markets are impacted by the news – so if you can thoroughly understand the news, and do it quickly, you can have a headstart on changes in the market. Using artificial intelligence, they devised software that could instantly analyze breaking news, assess its meaning and, within seconds, make trades based on that analysis.

Like many things in the world of hedge funds, this AI remained a toy for billionaires and professional investors. But Amareos, a Hong Kong startup, is looking to bring it to the people.

Taking the world’s temperature

“We are trying to democratize big data,” says Philippe El-Asmar, co-founder of Amareos.

Amareos is about as “big data” as you can get. The service analyzes more than one million websites and a plethora of social media networks. Using an artificial intelligence developed by partners Thomson Reuters and Market Psych, Amareos takes the temperature of the internet on specific issues.

Interested in global sentiment on the US dollar? Amareos can analyze the global chatter on the currency and present users with a detailed breakdown – how many people are angry about it, how many are trustful, how many are disgusted.

Today’s graph of how the internet feels about the US dollar.

“I can tell you how much joy there is on the S&P 500 and how people feel about the renminbi,” Philippe says. “A group of psychologists and data scientists worked to develop this. We go further than positive or negative – it can even detect irony and sarcasm.”

Amareos was launched last year, and is still in its early days. The service can analyze feelings on currencies, equities, commodities, and countries themselves. But there is no reason that it needs to stay in the world of finance.

We are trying to democratize big data.

“Right now we’re only focusing on financial markets, but what we’re doing could be applied to anything – politics, PR, marketing,” says Philippe.

It’s easy to see how a tool like Amareos could quickly outgrow its financial sector focus – its data would be useful for anything from testing the impact of an ad campaign to polling the public perceptions of a presidential candidate.

It is free to open up a trial account on Amareos, and for the data curious, the service is a must-try. I signed up for an account and was, in moments, seeing that the global sentiment for coffee beans is a bit negative, but uranium is wildly popular. People are sad about the prices of natural gas, but they love palm oil.

I switch from commodities to countries, and I’m greeted by this map:

Just getting started