I think this rounds to true and will change over time, largely as the preferences (and professional backgrounds) of the customer base for the high end changes.
An underremarked feature of the world: simple capability to ship user-facing software which was Actually Not Awful was an extremely limited skill set until quite recently.
Maybe ten firms worldwide could do it in 2000 and none of them were doing it in finance.
That’s increasingly “Look, if it is a priority to you, books balance at the end of the quarter. If it is a priority for you, the mobile app is Basically Fine.” sort of capability in finance.
And so I think it’s a matter of time before the UX of premium services approaches the UX of e.g. Cash App or Wealthfront, which have very different intended client bases and use cases but broadly similar levels of “product sense.”
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So October 15th, the extended US tax deadline, is just around the corner, and I have some observations which are more about LLM progress than taxes.
Background: many people professionally involved with LLMs estimate 2026-2028 as the year where one can get an LLM to "do taxes."
I have a fairly complicated situation and have put more of my points into tax procedure than many AI researchers, and I did not previously expect to actually have this capability available in 2028.
On basis of experience with review, but not full execution, rethinking that.
I think the most likely form factor for actually deploying this in the real world is a software company which integrates LLMs as a component but also has a lot of special sauce.
Be that as it may, what I actually had available yesterday was the standard chat interface.
I think the economic logic of this is inevitable, in that you’ll ~need video to get your N+1 marketing post through the noise on social media even as a Taylor Swift, and your choices are either a $100k shoot *per post* or a relatively junior employee with some taste.
Also expect the friendly neighborhood barbecue joint to get the same-y Madison Avenue look on their ads versus the Comic Sans and pink aesthetic that they might otherwise have ended up with.
“Is that shoot really $100k?”
It probably is if you do it the way her media operation would do it. You can get it done scrappily for like $4-10k. Partly that’s because major brands with professional review teams are buying a different artifact than “Just the file please.”
Listening to a podcast (Trillions) a guest made an interesting claim:
Guest: You know when you swipe a card at [coffee shop] part of the fee pays for your ability to reverse the transaction with the coffee shop. But come on, no one reverses transactions with [coffee shops].
I have removed the name of the coffee shop so that no one believes I am commenting on private financial details when I say: oh you sweet summer child.
You and I will likely go through life having very few arguments with baristas. Baristas do not experience their lives as including very few arguments with customers.
The existence of YouTube does not make reading and writing less valuable. It gives children a constant companion who is responsive, preternaturally so, to their desires and curiosity.
(I devote a bit of brain space—not too much but I pray not to little—to making sure that constant companion does not make the entire world look like a pale imitation of itself, which would be wrong but could easily look accurate to the subjective experience of a child.)
“Any parenting tips?”
I do not have the constant fights about screen time some parents report, do not know how much of that is due to decisions I’ve made, and have one regret: we went two years without a TV due to moving and I should have made that permanent versus “completing.”
(In particular note the cap on cash back and the carveout for particular transaction types which some users are able to generate arbitrarily high amounts of or would naturally have arbitrarily high amounts relative to “normal” CC use.)
“How does this happen?”
Credit card PMs are extremely aware that there are multiple different personas for credit card use out there. One of them has a name in various banks, but you can think of them as Mercenary Financial Enthusiast.
If I can give a slightly more optimistic take on this: much of how commercial software development is done trades some resources for others, in ways that might not be rational for people with very different strengths than e.g. AppAmaGooFaceSoft or BigCo customers.
A lot of AWS services exist so that two teams don't need to have a meeting.
That *is not a criticism of either AWS or those two teams.* That is a preference one can have about time allocation and corporate structure, and capitalism will help you satisfy it.
If you are not constrained on organizational complexity, if meetings with yourself are free, then a lot of the standard stack that BigCo uses is both overkill and underkill at the same time.