Comment by namaria
11 hours ago
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.)
You can just search for "interest calculator" there many such sites.
Also, I don't quite get it:
> everything was beautifully accurate up until the end when the number felt suspicious
The LLM generated text about compounding interest over 400 years from early modern british pounds to modern dollars was accurate? How is it possible to be accurate about an absurd operation?