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Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

It seems their business model is more existentially challenged by LLMs these days. I’m waiting for the regulations preventing AI being used for taxes and legal counsel

Edit: This is timely being on the homepage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45601230

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There are many things I would trust an AI with, but my taxes are not one of them.

Certainly not to do your taxes, but they're useful for tax questions, as long as your verify the responses.

Taxes are actually not a bad problem for AI, because a lot of the final calculations can be easily verified/sanity checked. The AI won't be able to get away with any math errors, the issues you'll likely see are incorrect categorisation of income or suboptimal deductions. The substeps like categorisation shouldn't be too difficult to manually verify

Don't use AI for tasks where you don't have the qualifications to verify that the result is correct.

The problem is if you need to verify everything you might as well do it yourself.

I'm not convinced an AI will ever know how to distinguish a personal and business expense from a CSV dump of your credit card too.

If you're going to go down the rabbit hole of creating a CSV, you can already parse and categorize it pretty easily without AI. I've built and have been using https://github.com/nickjj/plutus for a bit now and I've gotten quarterly taxes down to less than 10 minutes.

We've taken the one task that computers are inherently good at and somehow made it worse.

I agree, tax prep will probably be done by AI soon, for better or worse.

On the other hand, there's a broader business model here: lobbying to obfuscate mandatory government paperwork so that a 3rd party service is practically a requirement. It's not difficult to see AI companies expanding into that industry.

Literally the only reason to use "AI" (it's not actually AI so we should stop calling it that) is to inflate the profits of LLM companies.

We already have reliable systems that do these things in the rest of the world, not to mention TurboTax already does it in the US without LLMs.

this seems to fall into the category of Intuit offering AI (RAG/MCP + tuned base model) and not people directly going to chatgpt for half-baked advice (and still needing to fill out all the forms and perform hand calculations themselves)?

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