Advancing finance with Claude Opus 4.6

151 pointsposted 2 days ago
by da_grift_shift

33 Comments

typpo

2 days ago

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/

someuser54541

2 days ago

I feel like I'd be really skeptical of results from a non-deterministic model for something as precise as accounting....

nl

2 days ago

The deterministic part (calculations) is done by Excel.

The non-deterministic part is turning human instructions ("calculate the NPV over 10 years for X given Y") into Excel.

This is already a non-deterministic process (humans are non-deterministic!). The question is if an AI model can be more reliable than humans, and I can't see any reason why it wouldn't be.

The correct path is pretty clear, so the logits for following that path are going to be a long way from off-path.

For something like this the real problem is training the model to use Excel (which will show up by it being confused which sheet it is on or trying to use the wrong window or things like that), not the non-determinism.

altmanaltman

a day ago

so basically what you're saying is that: it doesn't do the math, it tells the math-doing-thing what math to do. Basically, instead of humans using Excel, imagine AI using Excel?

Yet I don't understand the aha moment here? It might save analyst time but aren't there already enough automation that you don't really need to tell the AI to tell the math-doing-thing to do the math because the math-doing-thing is already optimized for most general functions? What are we gaining from adding the non-deterministic process here when the real non-deterministic process is still the human being prompting what to do?

Seems like a solution to a non-problem from my pov.

nl

2 hours ago

Setting up spreadsheets is just programming in an unconventional environment.

And it has all the requirement translation requirements of programming

altmanaltman

an hour ago

Sure in the sense that you're setting up a program that has inputs and outputs etc. But then all math is programming. All language is too, even speaking can be considered programming if you're stretching the definition enough. But I will disagree that setting up spreadsheets = basically software engineering.

sdf2erf

2 days ago

"The non-deterministic part is turning human instructions ("calculate the NPV over 10 years for X given Y") into Excel."

erm theres an NPV function built in excel.

nl

a day ago

> erm theres an NPV function built in excel.

Exactly!

The LLM just needs to make sure it uses it appropriately. Doing that bit is the non-deterministic part, but the NPV calculation itself is completely deterministic.

sdf2erf

a day ago

Youre not quite getting it, are you.

nl

a day ago

When you setup a spreadsheet, you choose a column or cell to show the NPV. You use the npv formula on this cell and apply it to inputs from other columns or cells.

This process of deciding what data to put in what column and how to apply NPV to it is non-deterministic. You could choose to put it in column A, or column B or maybe even row 3 - it depends!

The LLM does that part non-deterministically.

antinomicus

a day ago

Do you really think you come off as a good person posting things like this? This place is to satisfy intellectual curiosity, not to lord your supposed intelligence over others, without even proving it exists in the first place.

hugh-avherald

a day ago

But humans non-deterministically use that or use a hand-rolled formula.

sdf2erf

a day ago

Humans dont enter numbers non-determinstically. WTF are you on about lmao.

Have you ever done anything related to corp finance/valuation in a professional setting? Highly doubt it.

purplerabbit

2 days ago

I know plenty of nondeterministic accountants

aaaalone

2 days ago

With tool use you do reduce the risks.

It's not like these models calculate.

dr_dshiv

2 days ago

Yeah, seriously, I use AI all day every day but that terrifies me.

belter

2 days ago

Dont use Excel for accounting....

tomjakubowski

2 days ago

An Excel spreadsheet is a bad source of truth for data. It's fine for analytics though.

belter

2 days ago

HN ignorance on display...

The Journal of Accountancy - "Bugged by Excel’s calculation errors" - https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2014/mar/excel-c...

ICAEW (Institute of Chartered Accountants) — "Rounding Errors Revisited" (Excel Tips #447) - https://www.icaew.com/technical/technology/excel-community/e...

Just a reminder that an accountant who might say "I use Currency format" is still working in binary floating point as the format is just used as a display mask. And using VBA macros with the Currency type will hit problems at the boundary, when values move between the worksheet and the macro. The tool is broken in a way that proper accounting software is not...

"Floating-point arithmetic may give inaccurate results in Excel" - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/microsoft-365...

bovermyer

2 days ago

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.

Havoc

2 days ago

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

onlypassingthru

2 days ago

>Like generate it, delete numbers and populate by hand.

This is called 'Month End Close' in accountant speak.

warabe

2 days ago

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...

sdf2erf

2 days ago

I wouldnt worry. Unless you are just memorising stuff and dont actually understand anything - then you should.

Bombthecat

a day ago

Just like developers, accounting won't go away. Just less people needed.

Since demand is so insane high. We will just get into an equilibrium.

Not like developers, where like 25 percent of people want to do something with IT...

Ntrails

2 days ago

You'll use a ton of AI but it won't wipe the humans out. In the end you'll have a compositional change, likely nothing catastrophic imo. In part because there is a buck to stop and Claude ain't got no hands...

eggsby

2 days ago

Article did not load on my tablet :sweat_smile:

TacticalCoder

2 days ago

> 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.

henning

2 days ago

Their chart only goes up to 70.

layer8

2 days ago

At least it starts at zero.

storus

a day ago

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.

behnamoh

2 days ago

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".

cadamsdotcom

4 hours ago

It’s just marketing, no evil intended.