Doom scrolling and the next financial crash!

aroominyork

Methinks you guys should take this to a tech forum. Now, about those Japanese smaller company funds...

Bostonerimus1

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82125965#Comment_82125965

I've asked Gemini cross border taxation questions and the answers are often vague or just wrong. I put this down to the AI being taught on all the bad answers posted to Reddit which drown out the more accurate answers of professionals and a few knowledgeable amateurs. Reddit content should get a very low weighting in the fitting.

GeoffTF

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82126208#Comment_82126208

You can misuse AI, but that does not mean it is useless. It is improving rapidly.

Bobziz

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82126395#Comment_82126395

Absolutely, and like any tool you need to learn how to use it. For tax questions I tend to ask it to use only HMRC sources.

Bostonerimus1

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82126395#Comment_82126395

The problem is AI comes with an aura of perfection and many people will take its answers as correct 100% of the time.

The LLMs themselves are showing marginal gains for large training costs, but the "harnesses" to apply AI are getting more useful. I assume AI will get embedded into many things and there will be ups and downs. I work with a software engineer that has used Claude Code to port some routines from one DAQ board to another and it worked very well. However, the actual code isn't easy to follow and he's not sure how efficient it is and is worried about maintaining it.

I'm not completely against AI, but I do find the current crop of AI CEOs to be scary and the way it's being financed and the scale of the infrastructure being built seems unsustainable to me.

Bostonerimus1

I've used Gemini for US/UK cross border tax questions and most of the time it's right, but it often gets some details wrong. A while back it had not caught up with a new HMRC policy to tax lump sum distributions from US DC retirement account. It eventually started to get it right, presumably after new training. However, I would use a cross border tax specialist AI that is deeply trained on HMRC, IRS and professional tax specialists data and was guaranteed to be up to date.

I don't think the future is General Intelligence, but it might be Specialized Intelligence.

Dead_keen

For the oldies among us, as translated by ChatGPT:

1. An MP3 player is a bit like a record player.
2. Like an album cover, songs are displayed in the order that they are laid down.
3. @talexuser would prefer to have the songs in alphabetical order.
4. There is a bit of a disagreement about how to change the order of the songs.
5. In the old days, you could record the songs onto reel-to-reel tape, cut the tape between songs with a razor blade and splice the pieces back together in a different order. Voilà: a new running order.
6. The disagreement is essentially about whether AI suggested the wrong digital equivalent - or suggested the right one but the user ran it incorrectly.

If it was me, I would open Claude Code or Codex and say: Find the songs on my computer and do whatever you need to do to so that my MP3 player plays them in alphabetical order. (***)

(*** an over-simplification - I'd ask it to find me a better MP3 player that allows different ways of sorting songs (as the Phantom of The Opera doesn't work for me in alphabetical order) but, failing that, I'd (i) tell it where the files were as I don't want it rummaging all over the place, (ii) test it on one album first, and (iii) not delete anything until I am happy it works properly.

EthicsGradient

I really, really, really think this conversation about alphabetising your record collection needs to be taken somewhere else. It has zero to do with "the next financial crash", even if people feel AI ought to have a better ability to fix every last detail of their lives.

masonic

I'd like to apologise for taking the bait. I shall delete my off-topic posts. It is now clear to me that there is an intent to derail this thread and unwillingness to engage in the proper place. Nevertheless, I have created the following thread for the OP to continue discussing with an audience that is more likely to be helpful.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6682324/alphabetising-200gb-plus-of-classical-music-arranged-in-composer

masonic

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82127676#Comment_82127676

Quoting this over here on Savings & Investments because it is about the AI bubble and whether your experience is evidence that AI is over-hyped, and the valuations associated with it are unrealistic.

Using a technical edge-case as evidence that the AI sector is in a bubble does not make any sense. The commercial value driving valuations right now comes from automating large-scale workflows, processing huge amounts of data, writing standard code, and streamlining operations across industries. Pointing to a consumer AI search failing to solve a hyper-specific, obscure utility task doesn't prove the technology lacks economic value, any more than a Swiss Army knife failing to act as a sledgehammer proves multi-tools are useless.

What makes the argument even weaker is that conventional search engines, technical forums, and existing software utilities haven't handed over a quick, off-the-shelf solution to your problem either. When a problem is genuinely niche or fundamentally constrained by how a system works, neither a standard Google search, an AI summary, nor human forum members are going to deliver an easy answer. You have your thread in the techie stuff forum now, so maybe someone will have some expert knowledge and make a suggestion.

I am actually in the camp that believes AI company valuations are currently stretched, overly speculative, and due for a market correction. However, basing a macro-economic bear case on "it couldn't solve my specific tech issue" does the position a real disservice. There are plenty of solid financial, ROI, and capital expenditure arguments for why AI stock prices may be inflated, but this just isn't one of them.