[reilly3000]

I get it. A stunning indictment of our times… but there is something useful AI could be doing that MS has dropped the ball on: personal finance management. I should be able to have copilot grab all my transactions, build me budgets, show me what if scenarios, raise concerns, and help me meet my goals. It should be able to work in Excel where I can see and steer it. The math should be validated with several checks and the output needs to be trustworthy. Ship a free personal finance agent harness and you have your killer app.

I think there are business reasons why they wouldn’t do that, and that makes me sad.

[coffeefirst]

I have a personal budget app and every so often I try and get the latest model to compare my data against the statements and find any discrepancies.

Every time it hallucinates visits to Starbucks.

I never go to Starbucks, it’s just a probable finding given the words in the question.

This should work. I want it to work. But until it can do this correctly all analysis capabilities should be suspect.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

Maybe it's the model you are using.

Even a year ago I had success with Claude giving it a photo of my credit card bill and asking it to give me repeating category subtotals, and it flawlessly OCR'd it and wrote a Python program to do as asked, giving me the output.

I'd imagine if you asked it to do a comparison to something else it'd also write code to do it, so get it right (and certainly would if you explicity asked).

[malfist]

Have you tried to get LLMs to do math or quantitative analysis? They're remarkably poor at it