Affirm Holdings Inc. (AFRM) shares gained about 0.42% in the overnight session late Sunday after the company launched a transformer-based machine learning model for real-time underwriting. The model, which went live in the U.S. last week, is built on 14 years of transaction-level data and underwriting experience, analyzing the sequence and timing of events across a consumer’s credit history. It is designed to initially approve additional eligible applicants, including consumers with limited credit histories or no FICO scores. Affirm’s own research shows that compared with a control group, it generated 3.4% more completed purchases, while the additional loans performed better than a comparable expansion under Affirm’s previous models. CEO Max Levchin said in an interview with CNBC that while human underwriters “could never do what we're doing with transformers,” they would not replace them completely, and the model is designed to augment, rather than replace, human judgment. Levchin said the model could parse buckets of information with different numbers of dimensions, and that ultimately “a human decides what's worth looking at, what's not worth looking at.” In a post on X, he also clarified that the system would not pose any threat to humans.