HN Reader

Lately my company has been doing a lot of complex accounting and reporting in spreadsheets. Overall was surprised by how well both GPT and Claude handled some of these extremely tedious tasks. Not uncommon to have an hours-long task compressed to minutes.

My anecdotal experience is GPT 5.2 Pro is decently ahead of Claude Opus 4.5 in this category when it gets to the tricky stuff, both in presentation and accuracy. The long reasoning seems to help a lot. But, apparently the benchmarks do not agree.

Edit - noticed OpenAI specifically focuses on finance use cases in their gpt-5.3-codex blog as well https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-3-codex/

And then you hand it to your boss who takes a 20 second look at it and asks why you made a projection that assume massive revenue growth and 3 years of perfectly flat utilities, insurance, G&A - no inflation etc.

It does look really promising as a skeleton starting point though. Like generate it, delete numbers and populate by hand.

Not unlike the boilerplate start we saw in AI coding a couple years back

Based on the article... is this basically just making Claude better at formatting and data presentation, or does it also get better at analysis? I get the impression it's the former.

Article did not load on my tablet :sweat_smile:

It's time to sell hedge fund stocks!! Jokes aside, I took the CFA exam last week and now I'm starting to worry about my career...

> The side-by-side outputs below show how output quality has improved from Claude Opus 4.5 to Opus 4.6.

Disclaimer: I use AI to code (and I code for finance) and I love Anthropic.

But: for f-ck's sake, I cannot click on the picture and have it show up in full. It stays at its tiny size, impossible to read the numbers. I had to right-click and "open in a new tab".

AI is, somehow, definitely still not fully there yet.

Their chart only goes up to 70.

Anthropic does anything to keep the Claude hype going; from fearmongering ("AI bad, need government regulations") to wishful thinking ("90% of code will be written by AI by the end of 2025" —Dario) to using Claude in applications it has no business being in (Cowork, accessing all your files, what could go wrong?) to releasing "research" papers every now and then to show how their AI "almost got out" and they stopped it (again, to show their models are "just that good") to prescribing what the society should do to adapt to the new reality to doing worthless surveys on "how AI is reshaping economy, but mostly our AI not others".

Now this is going to be interesting to watch to see if the finance bros financing this AI wave to get rid of SW engineers will keep financing getting rid of their own.