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Yeah, it won't do your taxes for you, but it can sure help you do them yourself. Probably won't put you out of your job either, but it might help you accomplish

Yeah, it won't do your taxes for you, but it can sure help you do them yourself. Probably won't put you out of your job either, but it might help you accomplish more. Of course, one result of people accomplishing more in less time is that you need fewer people to do the same amount of work - so some jobs could be lost. But it's also possible that for the most part instead, more will be accomplished overall.

codr7 2y ago
People frame that like it's something we gain, efficiency, as if before we were wasting time by thinking for ourselves. I get that they can do certain things better, I'm not sure that delegating to them is free of charge. We're paying something, losing something. Probably learning and fulfillment. We become increasingly dependent on machines to do anything. Something important happened when we turned the tables around, I don't feel it gets the credit it should. It used to be humans telling machines what to do. Now we're doing the opposite.
- walleeee 2y ago
  Yes. Use an LLM with any regularity to write code or anything else and the effect becomes perceptible. It discourages effortful thought. Sometimes the means are just as important as the ends, if not more
CamperBob2 2y ago
If it had access to my books, a current-gen frontier LLM most certainly could do my taxes. I don't understand that entire line of reasoning.
- collingreen 2y ago
  And it might even be right and not get you in legal trouble! Not that you'd know (until audit day) unless you went back and did them as a verification though.
  - Devorlon 2y ago
    And if I did my own taxes, I wouldn't know if I were in legal trouble until audit day as well!
    - cowhow 2y ago
      If you hired a competent professional accountant, in all but the most contrived scenarios you wouldn't have to worry about legal trouble at all.
      - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
        Except now, you can hire a competent professional accountant and discover on audit day that they got taken over by private equity, replaced 90% of the professionals doing work with AI and made a lot of money before the consequences become apparent.
        collingreen 2y ago
        This is such a fun timeline
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Yes, but you're going to pay through the nose for the "wouldn't have to worry about legal trouble at all" (part of what you're paying for with professional services is a degree of protection from their fuckups). So going back to apples-and-apples comparison, i.e. assuming that "spend a lot of money to get it done for you" is not on the table, I'd trust current SOTA LLM to do a typical person's taxes better than they themselves would.
        redserk 2y ago
        TurboTax handles it fine with what are effectively a bunch of defined if-else statements.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  I'm on a financial forum where people often ask tax questions, generally _fairly_ simple questions. An obnoxious recent trend on many forums, including this one, is idiots feeding questions into a magic robot and posting what it says as a response. Now, ChatGPT may be very good at, er, something, I dunno, I am assured that it has _some_ use by the evangelists, but it is not good at tax, and if people follow many of the answers it gives then they are likely to get in trouble.
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    If a trillion-parameter model can't handle your taxes, that to me says more about the tax code than the AI code. People who paste undisclosed AI slop in forums deserve their own place in hell, no argument there. But what are some good examples of simple tax questions where current models are dangerously wrong? If it's not a private forum, can you post any links to those questions?
    - rsynnott 2y ago
      So, a super-basic one I saw recently, in relation to Irish tax. In Ireland, ETFs are taxed differently to normal stocks (most ETFs available here are accumulating, they internally re-invest dividends; this is uncommon for US ETFs for tax reasons). Normal stocks have gains taxed under the capital gains regime (33% on gains when you sell). ETFs are different; they're taxed 40% on gains when you sell, and they are subject to 'deemed disposal'; every 8 years, you are taxed _as if you had sold and re-bought_. The ostensible reason for this is to offset the benefit from untaxed compounding of dividends. Anyway, the magic robot 'knew' all that. Where it slipped up was in actually _working_ with it. Someone asked for a comparison of taxation on a 20 year investment in individual stocks vs ETFs, assuming re-investment of dividends and the same overall growth rate. The machine happily generated a comparison showing individual stocks doing massively better... On closer inspection, it was comparing growth for 20 years for the individual stocks to growth of 8 years for the ETFs. (It also got the marginal income tax rate wrong.) But the nonsense it spat out _looked_ authoritative on first glance, and it was a couple of replies before it was pointed out that it was completely wrong. The problem isn't that the machine doesn't know the rules; insofar as it 'knows' anything, it knows the rules. But it certainly can't reliably apply them. (I'd post a link, but they deleted it after it was pointed out that it was nonsense.)

codr7 2y ago

People frame that like it's something we gain, efficiency, as if before we were wasting time by thinking for ourselves. I get that they can do certain things better, I'm not sure that delegating to them is free of charge. We're paying something, losing something. Probably learning and fulfillment. We become increasingly dependent on machines to do anything. Something important happened when we turned the tables around, I don't feel it gets the credit it should. It used to be humans telling machines what to do. Now we're doing the opposite.

walleeee 2y ago
Yes. Use an LLM with any regularity to write code or anything else and the effect becomes perceptible. It discourages effortful thought. Sometimes the means are just as important as the ends, if not more

CamperBob2 2y ago

If it had access to my books, a current-gen frontier LLM most certainly could do my taxes. I don't understand that entire line of reasoning.

collingreen 2y ago
And it might even be right and not get you in legal trouble! Not that you'd know (until audit day) unless you went back and did them as a verification though.
- Devorlon 2y ago
  And if I did my own taxes, I wouldn't know if I were in legal trouble until audit day as well!
  - cowhow 2y ago
    If you hired a competent professional accountant, in all but the most contrived scenarios you wouldn't have to worry about legal trouble at all.
    - ZeroGravitas 2y ago
      Except now, you can hire a competent professional accountant and discover on audit day that they got taken over by private equity, replaced 90% of the professionals doing work with AI and made a lot of money before the consequences become apparent.
      - collingreen 2y ago
        This is such a fun timeline
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Yes, but you're going to pay through the nose for the "wouldn't have to worry about legal trouble at all" (part of what you're paying for with professional services is a degree of protection from their fuckups). So going back to apples-and-apples comparison, i.e. assuming that "spend a lot of money to get it done for you" is not on the table, I'd trust current SOTA LLM to do a typical person's taxes better than they themselves would.
      - redserk 2y ago
        TurboTax handles it fine with what are effectively a bunch of defined if-else statements.
rsynnott 2y ago
I'm on a financial forum where people often ask tax questions, generally _fairly_ simple questions. An obnoxious recent trend on many forums, including this one, is idiots feeding questions into a magic robot and posting what it says as a response. Now, ChatGPT may be very good at, er, something, I dunno, I am assured that it has _some_ use by the evangelists, but it is not good at tax, and if people follow many of the answers it gives then they are likely to get in trouble.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  If a trillion-parameter model can't handle your taxes, that to me says more about the tax code than the AI code. People who paste undisclosed AI slop in forums deserve their own place in hell, no argument there. But what are some good examples of simple tax questions where current models are dangerously wrong? If it's not a private forum, can you post any links to those questions?
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    So, a super-basic one I saw recently, in relation to Irish tax. In Ireland, ETFs are taxed differently to normal stocks (most ETFs available here are accumulating, they internally re-invest dividends; this is uncommon for US ETFs for tax reasons). Normal stocks have gains taxed under the capital gains regime (33% on gains when you sell). ETFs are different; they're taxed 40% on gains when you sell, and they are subject to 'deemed disposal'; every 8 years, you are taxed _as if you had sold and re-bought_. The ostensible reason for this is to offset the benefit from untaxed compounding of dividends. Anyway, the magic robot 'knew' all that. Where it slipped up was in actually _working_ with it. Someone asked for a comparison of taxation on a 20 year investment in individual stocks vs ETFs, assuming re-investment of dividends and the same overall growth rate. The machine happily generated a comparison showing individual stocks doing massively better... On closer inspection, it was comparing growth for 20 years for the individual stocks to growth of 8 years for the ETFs. (It also got the marginal income tax rate wrong.) But the nonsense it spat out _looked_ authoritative on first glance, and it was a couple of replies before it was pointed out that it was completely wrong. The problem isn't that the machine doesn't know the rules; insofar as it 'knows' anything, it knows the rules. But it certainly can't reliably apply them. (I'd post a link, but they deleted it after it was pointed out that it was nonsense.)