Chat GPT is usually wrong on financial matters

ClubMan said:

I disagree based on extensive recent experience

Click to expand...

Let's look at the example posted.


"Eliminating a €200k mortgage at 3.5% would save approximately €7,000 annually in interest, totaling €140,000 over 20 years."

Without even thinking hard about it at all, the €7k figure could only be correct for an interest only mortgage. Some quick calculations give a saving of c€78k, not €140k.

"This aligns with the “debt avalanche” method, targeting high-interest obligations first."
Hardly true of a mortgage.

"Tax Relief: Contributing €30k to a pension would yield €12,000 in tax savings (40% relief on €50k income), effectively costing €18,000 net."

Standard rate cut off is €44k, meaning not all of this contribution will get tax relief at 40%. No mention of backdating to the precious year.

"With a €100k pension at age 40, the user is below the recommended benchmark (1x annual salary by 30, 3x by 40)."
This is just rubbish

AlbacoreA said:

it would be interesting to hear forums members experience and tests with it.

Click to expand...

I tested it with questions taken from QFA practice exams (hardly a difficult test). It was wrong about 50% of the time.

Fortune said:

tested it with questions taken from QFA practice exams (hardly a difficult test). It was wrong about 50% of the time.

Click to expand...

Did you sense any pattern in the type of questions it got wrong or right? Or was it completely random?

Fibbernacci said:

Did you sense any pattern in the type of questions it got wrong or right?

Click to expand...

I didn't see any particular pattern. Numbers were sometimes right, sometimes wrong. It was almost as if it was someone not great with numbers doing the calculations (I suppose that's likely the case in the days it was trained on). Sometimes it hallucinated regulations that didn't exist, or just got them backwards (something allowed wasn't allowed, etc).

I did a test myself there with a specific question related to my industry and it gave a wrong answer. When I enquired why, it said that it doesn't parse text every time and uses 'generative' mode to make predictions. I then asked if I had specifically worded my question to force it to parse the text, would it have done that and it said it would have switched to 'parsing' mode. If that's true I wonder if the user could possibly increase accuracy of the responses by wording the questions in a particular way.

(but still not take financial advice from it lol)

Dr Strangelove said:

if you badger an LLM it will hallucinate a false response in many cases.

Click to expand...

That's quite the statement...

Been trying to get copilot to return documents I know are there. But it's like trying to get a cat to find a book in a library. I can't help but think it's easier to find it myself.

Going to try some coding stuff at some point.

It's pretty well known from the research that ChatGPT is quite willing to just make stuff up if it doesn't 'know' the answer to a question, or part of a question (ie if it hasn't been trained on the relevant information). It actually 'likes' to be corrected as this new knowledge (whether correct or not) is then fed into the database.

The problem is the amount of wrong or ambiguous information that has been used for the training. It's easy enough to spot this if you ask it questions about any area you are expert in already yourself. Or ask it questions about a very narrow field and see how it generates false information, or just throws in partially correct information (e.g. a person with the same name; a similarly named scheme from a different jurisdiction) as fact.

I find it completely useless as presently constituted. It will undoubtedly get better over time, as long as the big ethical questions around copyright etc can be sorted out.

ChatGPTs own 'opinion'...

Q: Is ChatGPT reliable for financial matters?

"ChatGPT can provide general information and insights related to financial matters, such as investment principles, budgeting tips, or explanations of financial concepts. However, it is not a substitute for professional financial advice. For personalized financial guidance, it's best to consult a certified financial advisor or expert who can consider your specific circumstances. Always verify information from multiple credible sources before making financial decisions."

A better test would be to give 5 financial advisors a few questions to answer and see how many of them are right. I would imagine that there would be great variety in the answers.

Then give the questions to Chat GPT and see if any of them are actually wrong.

Or better still, give Chat GPT the QFA exam and get it marked independently.

Lightning said:

Interesting that Askaboutmoney posts are being used to feed the Gemini model.

Click to expand...

Isn't it the case that most or all such publicly accessible AIs/LLMs are being trained on the complete visible (i.e. non deep/dark) web contents? Which is part of the reason that some of the results can be of variable/questionable quality - because there's a lot of rubbish on the web. E.g. the "AI recommends that people eat at least one small rock daily" example that came about because of a parodic article on The Onion...

ClubMan said:

Isn't it the case that most or all such publicly accessible AIs/LLMs are being trained on the complete visible (i.e. non deep/dark) web contents?

Click to expand...

Yeah, pretty much. LLMs are trained on massive datasets derived from publicly available online sources like websites, books, and code repositories. Which includes a huge amount of websites but not all websites. Reddit, the FT and some other large websites get paid for inclusion in the LLM datasets.

Lightning said:

Yeah, pretty much. LLMs are trained on massive datasets derived from publicly available online sources like websites, books, and code repositories.

Click to expand...

Which means, increasingly, that LLMs are being trained on material, much of which was produced by other LLMs (or even by the same LLM). To the extent that LLMs produce output which is incomplete, unreliable or downright false, this will be a self-reinforcing problem.

It's not great on legal matters either.

A super article in the Irish Times about the way the Rangers boarded the drug smuggling ship.


After failing to rendezvous with the Castlemore, their criminal bosses in Dubai instructed them to put the cocaine in a lifeboat and prepare to land them ashore.

Later, the crew were wrongly advised that the Irish authorities had no legal authority to board their vessel. It subsequently emerged in court the Dubai criminals were relaying legal advice from ChatGPT.

AlbacoreA said:

People don't fact check AI enough and it's often inaccurate. Mostly right means it's unreliable.

Click to expand...

That could apply to most humans too.

Brendan Burgess said:

Later, the crew were wrongly advised that the Irish authorities had no legal authority to board their vessel. It subsequently emerged in court the Dubai criminals were relaying legal advice from ChatGPT.

Click to expand...

From what I've seen from other sources, including the Garda Press Office video on YouTube, ChatGPT may not have been incorrect. The gangsters (and/or their paymasters in Dubai) seemed to have thought that they were in waters outside the jurisdiction of the Irish authorities when, in fact, they were inside. So they may simply have given the AI an inaccurate prompt/question based on their misunderstanding of the situation...

ClubMan said:

From what I've seen from other sources, including the Garda Press Office video on YouTube, ChatGPT may not have been incorrect. The gangsters (and/or their paymasters in Dubai) seemed to have thought that they were in waters outside the jurisdiction of the Irish authorities . . .

Click to expand...

Or, it may still have been incorrect. Even if the vessel was on the high seas, there are a couple of different bases on which boarding might have been permissible under international law.

An actual lawyer giving advice in this situation would ask a number of questions, some of which the people on the vessel would almost certainly have been unable to answer with confidence. One of the questions would have been "where were you when the Irish authorities first began to monitor your progress and follow you?" If the answer to that question was (as seems highly likely) "we don't know when they first began to monitor us", then the lawyer will say "In that case, I cannot tell you whether a boarding is authorised by international law". But that's the kind of answer an AI system is highly, highly averse to giving.

ClubMan said:

So they may simply have given the AI an inaccurate prompt/question based on their misunderstanding of the situation...

Click to expand...

Or — and this is extremely common — being highly motivate to hearing that boarding was not authorised, they may have given prompts/questions designed to elicit advice to that effect. (We see this quite often on askaboutmoney — people give the facts which are favourable to the view they would like to take of their situation, but getting the facts which are less favourable to them can be like drawing teeth.)

A human lawyer is familiar with the natural tendency of people to focus on the facts and circumstances that give them hope, and he will ask questions designed to uncover the facts that they would prefer to downplay. AI chatbots don't do that.

Brendan Burgess said:

askaboutmoney is better than a financial advisor as different views are given

Click to expand...

I would absolutely and very seriously doubt this Brendan.

Brendan Burgess said:

There is a huge risk with a financial advisor that you are sold the products which benefits the advisor rather than the client.

Click to expand...

Is this really true, Brendan?

My understanding is that advisors must make full disclosure of any tied agency or similar arrangements they have with product providers, and that outside this, there is no massive difference in terms of intermediary remuneration etc in the offerings presented by the various prestigious, market-leading life and pensions companies.

The biggest risk that I see in relation to life and pensions is like that of the various places where one can buy shoes. If you remain overly suspicious of the motives and earnings of every shoe seller, you'll sooner or later end up barefoot.