8 ms·

Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6

154 points by da_grift_shift 8mo ago

bovermyer 8mo ago
Based on the article... is this basically just making Claude better at formatting and data presentation, or does it also get better at analysis? I get the impression it's the former.
warabe 8mo ago
It's time to sell hedge fund stocks!! Jokes aside, I took the CFA exam last week and now I'm starting to worry about my career...
- sdf2erf 8mo ago
  I wouldnt worry. Unless you are just memorising stuff and dont actually understand anything - then you should.
- Ntrails 8mo ago
  You'll use a ton of AI but it won't wipe the humans out. In the end you'll have a compositional change, likely nothing catastrophic imo. In part because there is a buck to stop and Claude ain't got no hands...
- Bombthecat 8mo ago
  Just like developers, accounting won't go away. Just less people needed. Since demand is so insane high. We will just get into an equilibrium. Not like developers, where like 25 percent of people want to do something with IT...
typpo 8mo ago
Lately my company has been doing a lot of complex accounting and reporting in spreadsheets. Overall was surprised by how well both GPT and Claude handled some of these extremely tedious tasks. Not uncommon to have an hours-long task compressed to minutes. My anecdotal experience is GPT 5.2 Pro is decently ahead of Claude Opus 4.5 in this category when it gets to the tricky stuff, both in presentation and accuracy. The long reasoning seems to help a lot. But, apparently the benchmarks do not agree. Edit - noticed OpenAI specifically focuses on finance use cases in their gpt-5.3-codex blog as well https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/
- sdf2erf 8mo ago
  [flagged]
- belter 8mo ago
  Dont use Excel for accounting....
  - sdf2erf 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Pooge 8mo ago
      Do they use it as a source of truth or do they import that data in a spreadsheet to let the user make their own calculations? Not the person you responded to but I'm genuinely curious.
    - _se 8mo ago
      This entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting nonsense. Probably time to move on. "Don't use Excel for accounting" has to be the dumbest thing I've read in a year, even with all of the LLM bullshit going on. And that's including the people this morning who are apparently excited for LLMs to file their taxes.
      - kami23 8mo ago
        I've been having the same feelings lately, especially around the AI doomers coming in with some weird observations that make no sense. I usually don't comment, but seeing a lot of these types of overgeneralized responses. 'oh you do x? You don't do y? You're an idiot' That's not productive.
      - belter 8mo ago
        I have the impression today you will be one of the 10,000: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ But you are correct, this entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting nonsense... :-) "Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365-apps/excel/floating-point-arithmetic-inaccurate-result https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365... "Classification of Spreadsheet Errors" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.4224 https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.4224 "A study conducted by Coopers & Lybrand found errors in 90% of the spreadsheets audited." "Impact of Errors in Operational Spreadsheets" - https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0715 https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0715 "What We Don’t Know About Spreadsheet Errors Today" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02601 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02601
eggsby 8mo ago
Article did not load on my tablet :sweat_smile:
behnamoh 8mo ago
Anthropic does anything to keep the Claude hype going; from fearmongering ("AI bad, need government regulations") to wishful thinking ("90% of code will be written by AI by the end of 2025" —Dario) to using Claude in applications it has no business being in (Cowork, accessing all your files, what could go wrong?) to releasing "research" papers every now and then to show how their AI "almost got out" and they stopped it (again, to show their models are "just that good") to prescribing what the society should do to adapt to the new reality to doing worthless surveys on "how AI is reshaping economy, but mostly our AI not others".
- cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
  It’s just marketing, no evil intended.
henning 8mo ago
Their chart only goes up to 70.
- layer8 8mo ago
  At least it starts at zero.
Havoc 8mo ago
And then you hand it to your boss who takes a 20 second look at it and asks why you made a projection that assume massive revenue growth and 3 years of perfectly flat utilities, insurance, G&A - no inflation etc. It does look really promising as a skeleton starting point though. Like generate it, delete numbers and populate by hand. Not unlike the boilerplate start we saw in AI coding a couple years back
- onlypassingthru 8mo ago
  >Like generate it, delete numbers and populate by hand. This is called 'Month End Close' in accountant speak.
TacticalCoder 8mo ago
> The side-by-side outputs below show how output quality has improved from Claude Opus 4.5 to Opus 4.6. Disclaimer: I use AI to code (and I code for finance) and I love Anthropic. But: for f-ck's sake, I cannot click on the picture and have it show up in full. It stays at its tiny size, impossible to read the numbers. I had to right-click and "open in a new tab". AI is, somehow, definitely still not fully there yet.
storus 8mo ago
Now this is going to be interesting to watch to see if the finance bros financing this AI wave to get rid of SW engineers will keep financing getting rid of their own.
4corners4sides 8mo ago
The benchmarks look good. Slide decks and spreadsheets look better. The people must use Claude Cowork and have their Claude Code moment and figure out the consequences. It will be really interesting to see articles like this (https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey) written by people who actually care about accuracy in places like KPMG to get their perspective on things. I remember over hearing some normal people on the bus talking about essentially orchestrating some agent scraper to pull and summarise news from 40 different sites he identified as important which put him quite ahead of his peers. These were non-technical people orchestrating an agent workflow to make them better at work. Though there’s not much that tickles my software brain here. But the agents are coming for us all.

154 points by da_grift_shift 8mo ago

Based on the article... is this basically just making Claude better at formatting and data presentation, or does it also get better at analysis? I get the impression it's the former.

warabe 8mo ago

It's time to sell hedge fund stocks!! Jokes aside, I took the CFA exam last week and now I'm starting to worry about my career...

sdf2erf 8mo ago
I wouldnt worry. Unless you are just memorising stuff and dont actually understand anything - then you should.
Ntrails 8mo ago
You'll use a ton of AI but it won't wipe the humans out. In the end you'll have a compositional change, likely nothing catastrophic imo. In part because there is a buck to stop and Claude ain't got no hands...
Bombthecat 8mo ago
Just like developers, accounting won't go away. Just less people needed. Since demand is so insane high. We will just get into an equilibrium. Not like developers, where like 25 percent of people want to do something with IT...

typpo 8mo ago

Lately my company has been doing a lot of complex accounting and reporting in spreadsheets. Overall was surprised by how well both GPT and Claude handled some of these extremely tedious tasks. Not uncommon to have an hours-long task compressed to minutes. My anecdotal experience is GPT 5.2 Pro is decently ahead of Claude Opus 4.5 in this category when it gets to the tricky stuff, both in presentation and accuracy. The long reasoning seems to help a lot. But, apparently the benchmarks do not agree. Edit - noticed OpenAI specifically focuses on finance use cases in their gpt-5.3-codex blog as well https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/

sdf2erf 8mo ago
[flagged]
belter 8mo ago
Dont use Excel for accounting....
- sdf2erf 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Pooge 8mo ago
    Do they use it as a source of truth or do they import that data in a spreadsheet to let the user make their own calculations? Not the person you responded to but I'm genuinely curious.
  - _se 8mo ago
    This entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting nonsense. Probably time to move on. "Don't use Excel for accounting" has to be the dumbest thing I've read in a year, even with all of the LLM bullshit going on. And that's including the people this morning who are apparently excited for LLMs to file their taxes.
    - kami23 8mo ago
      I've been having the same feelings lately, especially around the AI doomers coming in with some weird observations that make no sense. I usually don't comment, but seeing a lot of these types of overgeneralized responses. 'oh you do x? You don't do y? You're an idiot' That's not productive.
    - belter 8mo ago
      I have the impression today you will be one of the 10,000: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ But you are correct, this entire site is full of idiots confidently spouting nonsense... :-) "Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365-apps/excel/floating-point-arithmetic-inaccurate-result https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365... "Classification of Spreadsheet Errors" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.4224 https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.4224 "A study conducted by Coopers & Lybrand found errors in 90% of the spreadsheets audited." "Impact of Errors in Operational Spreadsheets" - https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0715 https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0715 "What We Don’t Know About Spreadsheet Errors Today" - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02601 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.02601

eggsby 8mo ago

Article did not load on my tablet :sweat_smile:

behnamoh 8mo ago

Anthropic does anything to keep the Claude hype going; from fearmongering ("AI bad, need government regulations") to wishful thinking ("90% of code will be written by AI by the end of 2025" —Dario) to using Claude in applications it has no business being in (Cowork, accessing all your files, what could go wrong?) to releasing "research" papers every now and then to show how their AI "almost got out" and they stopped it (again, to show their models are "just that good") to prescribing what the society should do to adapt to the new reality to doing worthless surveys on "how AI is reshaping economy, but mostly our AI not others".

cadamsdotcom 8mo ago
It’s just marketing, no evil intended.

henning 8mo ago

Their chart only goes up to 70.

layer8 8mo ago
At least it starts at zero.

Havoc 8mo ago

And then you hand it to your boss who takes a 20 second look at it and asks why you made a projection that assume massive revenue growth and 3 years of perfectly flat utilities, insurance, G&A - no inflation etc. It does look really promising as a skeleton starting point though. Like generate it, delete numbers and populate by hand. Not unlike the boilerplate start we saw in AI coding a couple years back

onlypassingthru 8mo ago
>Like generate it, delete numbers and populate by hand. This is called 'Month End Close' in accountant speak.

TacticalCoder 8mo ago

> The side-by-side outputs below show how output quality has improved from Claude Opus 4.5 to Opus 4.6. Disclaimer: I use AI to code (and I code for finance) and I love Anthropic. But: for f-ck's sake, I cannot click on the picture and have it show up in full. It stays at its tiny size, impossible to read the numbers. I had to right-click and "open in a new tab". AI is, somehow, definitely still not fully there yet.

storus 8mo ago

Now this is going to be interesting to watch to see if the finance bros financing this AI wave to get rid of SW engineers will keep financing getting rid of their own.

4corners4sides 8mo ago

The benchmarks look good. Slide decks and spreadsheets look better. The people must use Claude Cowork and have their Claude Code moment and figure out the consequences. It will be really interesting to see articles like this (https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey) written by people who actually care about accuracy in places like KPMG to get their perspective on things. I remember over hearing some normal people on the bus talking about essentially orchestrating some agent scraper to pull and summarise news from 40 different sites he identified as important which put him quite ahead of his peers. These were non-technical people orchestrating an agent workflow to make them better at work. Though there’s not much that tickles my software brain here. But the agents are coming for us all.