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Comment by mierz00

3 days ago

I disagree on this, there are plenty of problems in accounting that an LLM can help with.

I’ve built some software[0] that analyses general ledgers and uses LLMs to call out any compliance issues by looking at transaction and account descriptions.

Is it perfect, nope. But it’s a hell of a lot better than sifting through thousands of transactions manually which accountants do and get wrong all the time.

[0] - https://ledgeroptic.com

> I disagree on this

How can you disagree with the fact?

Some specific examples (like the one you mentioned, _adjacent_ to accounting per se) don't disprove the main point that 100% accuracy is fundamentally impossible with LLMs, while critical for all key accounting aspects.

> But it’s a hell of a lot better than sifting through thousands of transactions manually which accountants do and get wrong all the time.

I still wonder why humans getting things wrong is a problem, but LLMs getting more things more wrong more often than humans never is. At the very least you'll need a human accountant around to verify the LLM. Or I guess you could just practice "vibe accountancy" and hope things work out but that seems like a worse idea than a trained human professional. But I'm probably just a Luddite.

Also, I am admittedly not an accountant, but I don't think they manually sift through every transaction to verify compliance issues in every single case. That probably isn't how that works.

  • To be clear, I agree with you.

    Our target market is accountants. I want to help them not replace them.

    In the same way security audit tools aren’t replacing professionals, but that can help on initial scan.

  • > I still wonder why humans getting things wrong is a problem, but LLMs getting more things more wrong more often than humans never is

    Some people hate humanity so much that they cannot wait to replace us all with AI so they never have to interact with another human ever again

    That's honestly the only reason I can think that they are so biased toward AI

    • I find this take so strange, do you find no value in AI?

      I don’t even want AI to replace us, but it’s a great tool with many use cases.

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