Still working on a few essays about what I learned on using LLMs for coding but if you want a sneak peak, Complex Systems this week discusses the game I made in some detail.
I’m probably adding one essay to the series on LLMs for taxes.
It feels a bit weird to need to continue saying this, but yes, LLMs are obviously capable of doing material work in production, including in domains where answers are right or wrong, including where there is a penalty for being wrong. Of course they are.
“Why?”
Because a lot of discourse weights people and actors heavily where they cannot be right or wrong in any way that matters, and where correctness does not materially result in a different incentive for them.
And as a result you can expect to read “LLMs can’t do any real work, obviously, they are Markov chains without a world model” every day as they increasingly remodel / are used to remodel the economy.
I would be very confused about how people could possibly make and/or be convinced by claims which could be disproven in five minutes with a public website had I not had the experience of the last few years, during which that experience has not been rare.
Sneak peek. One of these days I’ll stop hallucinating. Until then, enjoy an entity capable of both context-aware spelling correction and also light humor.
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A word to the wise. Don't invent a fictitious entity and attempt to open a bank account for it. The laws for bank fraud are drafted *broadly.*
But if you must, then don't do it while arguing for an expansion of the Bank Secrecy Act regime, because the existing BSA regime already orders your bank to inform on you.
But if you must, then don't do it while engaging in organized pressure campaign against firms with strong recordkeeping culture and an institutional desire to please government.
Term life is a commodity product. Premium never changes after you lock in the term. Many people reading this will pay tens or low hundreds of dollars per million in coverage.
Next up at MicroConf: @robwalling on How to use AI in SaaS.
This has been something of an undercurrent in a lot of conversations here. Lots of unease and anxiety about it, and IMHO a bit overblown w/r/t impact on SaaS specifically.
With that, Rob:
Rob did informal survey of a few hundred TinySeed companies (he runs a VC/accelerator which invests in many bootstrapped-adjacent software companies) to see how its actually getting deployed in production.
Taxonomy: six-ish ways that companies actually metabolizing it.
AI as product: Difficult for bootstrappers to keep up with the labs on LLM/etc development. Very, very tractable to make something downstream of the labs.
A common model I have is that, like many people, I have some finite amount of consequential decisions I can make a day. This is sometimes a frustration for my wife, who wants me to spend a decision on e.g. “What color should we make…”
There are some classes of non-domestic decisions which still seem to take a slot, and where there are theoretically wrong answers, but where any plausible answer is fine.
I love having LLMs available for this.
Example from earlier: “Should we use X medication for symptom management of a minor recurring condition, or should we escalate to a medial professional for a recommendation?”
I probably could have Googled to kick off a research process, but that’s -1 for the day.
Also helps in the intermediate stages when you're dealing with accountant questions which might be, how do I say this nicely, "I thought I was hiring you to give me answers in this domain." Much higher bandwidth than multiple messages in an email thread at tax time.
"Why is he asking this?"
"Presumably he is attempting to qualify whether you have specified foreign financial assets."
"What does he really need to know?"
"Is the Tokyo condo held directly or in an LLC/etc"
"Held directly."
"OK so no you don't have those assets."
"Find authority"
Often people in our social class are worried about sounding elitist, and I understand that, but there's some perversity in being an elite and not being able to confess to that fact. The PMC is an elite class in the US political system.
Class membership is defined by being able to pass brutal intelligence and diligence filters. It is not simply "tests well", but you basically have to eat the PSAT for breakfast.
We all had classmates who did not eat the PSAT for breakfast.