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Comment by DecentShoes | Hacker News Reader

Can you give some examples??

Calculate the return on investment for a solar installation of a specified size on a specified property based on the current dynamic prices of all of the panels, batteries, inverter, and balance of system components, the current zoning and electrical code, the current cost of capital, the average insolation and weather taking into account likely changes in weather in the future as weather instability increases due to more global increase of temperature, the chosen installation method and angle, and the optimal angle of the solar panels if adjusted monthly or quarterly. Now do a Manual J calculation to determine the correct size of heat pump in each section of that property, taking into account number of occupants, insulation level, etc.

ChatGPT is currently the best solar calculator on the publicly accessible internet and it's not even close. It'll give you the internal rate of return, it'll ask all the relevant questions, find you all the discounts you can take in taxes and incentives, determine whether you should pay the additional permitting and inspection cost for net metering or just go local usage with batteries, size the batteries for you, and find some candidate electricians to do the actual installation once you acquire the equipment.

Edit: My guess is that it'd cost several thousand dollars to hire someone to do this for you, and it'll save you probably in the $10k-$30k range on the final outcomes, depending on the size of system.

My God, the first example is having an AI do math, then he says "Well I trust it to a standard deviation"

So it's literally the same as googling "what's the ballpark solar installation cost for X in Y area" unbelievable, and people pay $20+ per month for this

$200 :)

Any way to tell if the convincing final numbers it told you are real or halucinated ?

Solve the same task with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. If they agree, you can be reasonably sure.

I'm not opposed to experimenting, but that's a a recipe for false confidence in a final decision.

Where they agree it shows the data supports that answer - not necessarily that it is true, where they disagree it shows you need to hedge. That's useful.

This is so wrong!

e.g., if you had a heart condition, you can't just poll three LLMs and be "reasonably sure" you've properly diagnosed the ailment.

I checked them carefully myself with various other tools. It was using python to do the math so I trust it to a single standard deviation at least.

Standard deviation of what

I'm lost too. Financials are technology agnostic.

They probably meant that they could read (and trace) the logic in Python for correctness.

I wouldn't publish it as statistically significant but it's within the error bounds for a real human accomplishing the same task, to reword.

I see your edit.

I would recommend spending that "couple thousand" for quote(s). It's a second opinion from someone who hopefully has high volume in your local market. And your downside could be the entire system plus remediation, fines, etc.

To be clear, I'm not opposed to experimenting, but I wouldn't rely on this. Appreciate your comment for the discussion.

No I'm not relying on it in the sense of going out and running the entire project through it, but as an accurate screener for whether it's worth doing, there's nothing comparable available.

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