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AI chatbots give wrong answers to financial queries 'most of the time'

157 points · 89 comments · 1vuio0pswjnm7

ehe78qhe · 1789967399 · focus · HN ↗
Article is just a vague summary of <a href="https://www.saturnos.com/report/artificial-authority">https://www.saturnos.com/report/artificial-authority
Anecdotally, current models seem to be decent at general personal finance principles - certainly better than the majority of personal finance education that people get exposed to unless they seek it out and read a variety of books and sources. But I wouldn't trust them with direct decision making with actual money due to the training lag time on current tax policy, etc.
1. NitpickLawyer · 1789970815 · focus · HN ↗
  > certainly better than the majority of personal finance education that people get exposed to unless they seek it out and read a variety of books and sources.
  Also, models are now good enough that you can give them chapters from "authoritative" books, and they'll integrate that and come up with better answers even if their "vanilla" answers were average. And they'll tailor stuff to your particular situation. It's funny that the "agentic" stuff is only used in coding mostly, while it can and does work in other fields as well.
  As always, you kinda need to check it (at least spot check) but all in all I'd agree it's better than the average stuff you used to find with a quick google search.
  1. legostormtroopr · 1789974843 · focus · HN ↗
    So if you know a book that has the information you need, you just need to upload it into the model to get the right answer.
    Isn't that a bit circular - if you already know the authoritative source, why ask a model?
    Calazon · 1789975590 · focus · HN ↗
    Because it's faster.
    I've done this on different topics - I know the answer is in a particular eBook/PDF/document, but for whatever reason it's not trivial to look it up. The model can do it a lot more quickly than I can, and then I can still verify the accuracy.
    ImaCake · 1789987075 · focus · HN ↗
    Depends on the harness too. The MS copilot 365 chat interface happens to parse PDF and docx files before handing them to the model. Absolutely fantastic if your PDF is 1300 pages of concatenated reports and you want to find a single detail in it that you can't easily ctrl+f for.

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