Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Half the title is missing, and the missing half is doing some heavy lifting: “– especially if you ask the right questions”
- The hard part is behavioural/emotional/psychological rather than technical.
Usually discussions about money are never actually about money, but rather safety, fear, etc.
That’s where a real advisor earns their keep. Understanding the client and instilling confidence/comfort.
by jbs789 - People in this thread are massively underestimating the level of financial illiteracy in the general population.
We've had multiple people try to convince us to set up bank accounts for our kids, so that they could accumulate interest over 18 years.
More that tried to convince me to gamble on random pump and dump shitcoins.
More still that talked about "investing" in random collectables like Funko Pops or Pokemon cards - they're not a bubble, Logan Paul told me so!
You could replace the AI with a piece of paper that says "set aside 10% of your income and invest it in an ETF" and it would outperform the financial "advice" that people receive on a daily basis.
by AussieWog93 - AI financial advice is surprisingly good... for now. But given the historical trajectory of both the finance and advertising sectors I can't imagine it will, for long. AI responses without ads are unoptimized space!
It only takes Draftkings writing a very large check to Google before it responds to financial questions with solid advice before ending with, "Since you have a few spare hundred dollars laying around, why not try a high-risk investment into same-game parlays?"
by mjr00 - I wonder if telling (or somehow architecturally coaxing) the LLM it has 'skin in the game' will make it more risk-averse? I imagine it does.
This makes me wonder too about the entire premise and worthiness of these evals. They orient themselves around normal one-shot interactions with a likely non-sys-prompted model with no built up context or memory of the person. I doubt the mentioned 'job loss' scenario is even contextually seen as a 'loss'; it is only a circumstance descriptor, a single snapshot without a history. Maybe to get the best advice we actually need to tell the LLM our entire story, not just a narrow request for a question; a question that - itself - is biased to our own imaginings of what problem we perceive ourselves as having, which humans are often bad at.
by padolsey - Yes, financial planners will be one of the first industries to totally revamp itself because of AI. $2,000 for some SoA which is 99% boiler-plate? No thanks.
I spent years in this industry, and the advice from these 'experts' is demonstrably poor.
by networkOne - AI seems to struggle most when it has to make decisions with lots of trade-offs, especially where the context or implications of various decisions are nested, which is presumably why it struggles to write full software systems that are well-designed.
By comparison, financial advice is pretty simple, and there is a universally agreed-upon approach that most people should follow to maximize long-term financial health.
by jamestimmins - I use YNAB (https://www.ynab.com/) for budgeting so I already had all of my financial data in a single source. Exporting the CSVs locally and asking Claude to be my financial advisor legitimately gave me good advice. Not just nagging me to save more (which is always useful), but how to organize my budget categories better, detecting longer term spending patterns I wasn't thinking much about, researching credit card reward programs based on my spending patterns, digging deep into interest and tax rates in way I never bothered etc.
That was the first time I felt like real people's jobs were threatened by AI. Financial advisors and tax accountants better adapt quickly.
by dmix