Comment by namaria
15 hours ago
Why would you use an LLM for this? A simple spreadsheet can do this sort of calculation easily and deterministically.
Also, the assumption of '3% interest' is wrong. There are records of stretches achieving 15% returns for several years and reaching 23% in 2007, for example.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2005-01-11/harvard-l...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118771455093604172
This was 2 minutes of old school search, no LLM needed.
I don't think they intended to use AI, but tried to search instead and was presented with Googles AI summary / time wasted before the actual search results.
Long term interest rates over hundreds of years are a lot closer to 3% than 15%. You can't extrapolate a few good years like that.
You can't compound 760 1600s pounds for 400 years and get to a dollar amount either. The whole exercise is spurious. That is beside the point.
What I am saying is that asking an LLM to do interest calculation is absurd in itself, let well alone the absurd setting of trying to calculate interest rates across 4 centuries and different denominations.
It would be much more rational, in seeking to understand the growth of the Harvard endowment, to search for factual information about its modern history is my point. And if you wanna do abstract financial modelling exercises just use spreadsheets. Either way LLMs are a hilariously bad fit.
780 compounded by 3% per year for ~400 years is about 100 million by the way. So ignoring all else, off by at least two orders of magnitude.
Of course! I was originally imagining google would give me a website with an embedded calculator. I was most surprised by how everything was beautifully accurate up until the end when the number felt suspicious. (Much less suspicious than the examples I posted, actually.)
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