Hacker News Reader

Comment by doctoboggan | Hacker News Reader

If this were to become widely used, I can imagine executives writing financial statements, running them through an LLM, and tweaking it until they get the highest predicted future outcome. This would make the measure almost immediately useless.

View on HN

This is already how it works. Have you listened to an earnings call? Especially companies like Tesla? They are a dog and pony show to sell investors on the stock.

I am not saying executives aren't currently trying to game the system. I am saying currently the best they can do is estimate how thousands of analysts will respond. If LLM analysts become wide spread then they would be able to run simulations in a feedback loop until their report is optimized.

Anyone who has read many financial statements would understand this whole idea is already useless outside of financial statement education.

LLMs could help a person learn to understand financial statements better, that is it.

There are not all these hidden gems in financial statements though that are being currently missed that language models are going to unearth.

Financial statements are already intentionally vague and often intentionally misleading.

Corporate CEO/PR/Marketing are already the masters of writing many words while saying absolutely nothing.

Still, if you use GPT-4 it gives you 60% of accuracy in predicting if it's going to go up and down, which is considerably better than median human forecasters. Stop being so dismissive and start reading the numbers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com