Given most financial advisors tend to vend out suboptimal advice and steer customers in favour of products they receive a kickback for, I'm happy to be accepting of an unbiased LLM that's trained on bogleheads.org.
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.
> 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.
Single shot or with reasoning enabled? My experience is that reasoning dramatically reduces hallucinations and improves output quality. I don't trust models without it.
I don't have the time to review the underlying research and decide which one is more correct. My personal biases make me want to believe the current one. Your personal biases may be pulling you in the other direction. How do we make the conversation more intelligent than that?
Much of the testing is on Haiku and Luna, and criticizing the quality of free AI (!). But they do claim Opus 5 with reasoning still failed 39% of their financial questions.
These models do pretty well in benchmarks and real world so I'm highly suspicious of this article. Further more, in the original report, the examples of bad answers are from Haiku - at least 7 out of 10. Anyone who knows anything about LLMs know that haiku shouldn't be used for anything pretty much.
There's no reproducible set either. I'm not gonna trust this report.
Given most financial advisors tend to vend out suboptimal advice and steer customers in favour of products they receive a kickback for, I'm happy to be accepting of an unbiased LLM that's trained on bogleheads.org.
If that's what you want, I'll save you some tokens:
#!/bin/sh
while read question; do echo "Put it into VFIAX"; done
Article is just a vague summary of 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.
> 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.
Single shot or with reasoning enabled? My experience is that reasoning dramatically reduces hallucinations and improves output quality. I don't trust models without it.
> Overall, the best-performing model was Claude Opus 5 on “reasoning” mode, which still made mistakes in 39 per cent of answers.
Now, compare this to a recent story that seemed to claim the opposite:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49139102
I don't have the time to review the underlying research and decide which one is more correct. My personal biases make me want to believe the current one. Your personal biases may be pulling you in the other direction. How do we make the conversation more intelligent than that?
I would prefer to use agent-assisted python scripts that chatbot.
Agreed, this works really well for me. Double check the math/python, execute many times without a LLM that can change o
Well duh! If it's not using tools to look up the state of the market empirically it's not likely to be accurate financially.
Another summary report here, for those who can't get past the paywall:
https://www.financialreporter.co.uk/ai-models-give-wrong-fin...
Much of the testing is on Haiku and Luna, and criticizing the quality of free AI (!). But they do claim Opus 5 with reasoning still failed 39% of their financial questions.
I like how FT makes me accept cookies from their 46 “technology” (advertising) partners before showing me that the article is behind a paywall anyway.
You actually like that? I find it kind of annoying.
No they do not like it, it is a figure of speech to underline how much they do not like it.
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These models do pretty well in benchmarks and real world so I'm highly suspicious of this article. Further more, in the original report, the examples of bad answers are from Haiku - at least 7 out of 10. Anyone who knows anything about LLMs know that haiku shouldn't be used for anything pretty much.
There's no reproducible set either. I'm not gonna trust this report.
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