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Comment by kccqzy | Hacker News Reader

This is the common fallacy of “AI is terrible in my own field of which I have deep knowledge, but AI is totally fine in this other field of which I only have cursory knowledge.” Even ignoring all other aspects of financial advice and only focus on saving for retirement, there are so many topics involved like asset allocation glide paths, tax advantaged accounts, safe withdrawal rate, sequence of return risk, etc etc.

Financial advice is universally agreed upon, to the same extent that advice about software engineering is also universally agreed upon, you know, like write unit tests, write maintainable code, etc. But the devil is in the details.

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You are comparing to the almighty, not to the kind of financial advisor most people would find while looking at random. Between those with very high AUM fees, those selling bad vehicles that they get kickbacks for and such, people are basically getting robbed already.

It's not that one cannot get very specific, technical advice that helps, but someone without much financial literacy cannot tell someone doing honest work for a reasonable price from easy to find scammers with a marketing budget. The AI isn't going to get everything right, and it's not going to be easy to send good, proding questions to double check things without sufficient financial literacy, but that boring baseline is miles ahead of what most people get, as it's not trying to deceive you professionally, at least for now.

They are also assuming that the comparison is to a financial advisor and not either nothing or a relative/friend who may or may not give good advice.

> the kind of financial advisor most people would find while looking at random

Any regulated financial advisor will still go further and deeper than any LLM.

For example, most (all ?) LLMs won't even consider or ask you about applicable jurisdiction, which could easily end up as dangerous and costly advice.

Will an LLM do a proper client risk assessment ? Probably not.

Will an LLM deal correctly with vulnerable clients or PEPs ? Unlikely.

Will an LLM deal correctly with anything vaguely "complex" or contentious ? Definitely not.

And again, the financial advisor is regulated. Which means you have recourse through the regulator, and the advisor will also have liability insurance.

The LLM meanwhile ? Yeah, about that...

LLMs are mediocre for every topic that people talk about all the time.

When it's software development, it just happens that your mediocre code is incredibly bad. When it's financial advice or diet, it just happens that you mediocre advice is either the correct "do the hard thing, there is no magic" one or some crazy shit that will ruin your life.

One of the most hilarious things coming out of this community, easily disproved, is how high it thinks the code quality of the average developer is.

If AI writes code at the 51st percentile it's raising the bar.

> This is the common fallacy of “AI is terrible in my own field of which I have deep knowledge, but AI is totally fine in this other field of which I only have cursory knowledge.”

Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#%22Gell-Mann_...

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