AI chatbots get financial answers wrong 'most of the time'

This will be the same story for every industry again and again. AI is not good in x=Finance because models were not RL trained heavily on x=Finance capabilities yet. This is only because Big Labs have finance benchmarks lower in their priority list. Their first priority was solving programming because that gives the best leverage at this stage. As a side-effect they were able to solve a Millennium Prize problem, since theorem proving was also code.

So finance advisors in the comments section of FT are falling for the classical pitfall. They assume there is something fundamentally wrong with “AI chatbots” that they can’t do finance ever. They mistake the current products in the market for the technology itself. In near future someone will release “Claude x=Finance” and their world will shatter.

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.

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.

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.