Hacker News Reader

Comment by rexreed | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention their shady and undisclosed practices of using humans to read receipts when they pretend it's AI / OCR / NLP doing that.

"Expensify has admitted that its declared AI product SmartScan, which is assumed to scan the expense receipts and categorize the details into corresponding expense pool through a machine process, was actually assisted by humans. Breaching privacy of users, the receipts were posted on freelancing websites where freelancers used to take out extracts of information from receipts and send it to Expensify team."

[0] https://mantra.ai/blogs/pseudo-ai-when-humans-do-bots-work/

View on HN

There were some horror stories in YC about staff running certain receipts thru expensify, leading to bank or bitcoin accounts being penetrated and stolen.

I have to concur - i've had the ability to steer companies away from their product.

Expensify was OK before all the OCR stuff and shady billing.

Now with the S1 filing, whatever good designers and engineering talent they had will bail, and the company will be a hollow carcass of its former self. Avoid.

NOTE: the shady billing practices are traditionally the precursor to an S1 filing. Usually, a company going public has earnout/incentives, so they will do whatever it takes to increase revenue preIPO, even if that directly impairs the company's long term future.

> There were some horror stories in YC about staff running certain receipts thru expensify, leading to bank or bitcoin accounts being penetrated and stolen.

Can you cite this? I couldn't find anything seems obscure to search though.

Seems insane to me that a receipt leads to funds stolen.

Here is an example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15821976

How can you steal something from an account by looking at the receipt? I mean, receipts are being thrown out in piles, if that was possible i'd become rich just by digging in a dumpster near a convenience store.

You're saying that you want to commit identity fraud? Nice

I worked at Expensify a few years ago. Except for some email and PDFs, the process is entirely manual. The justification is that humans just do it better with a reasonable and predictable cost.

I tried building an AI/OCR style receipt digitisation system into my SaaS (https://usebx.com). Let me tell you, it was not easy at all. So much so, that I doubt the problem can be solved efficiently at scale without using humans. In the end, we even considered using Amazon mechanical turk, but it just wasn't worth the hassle.

At the time, I was also amazed beyond words at what Expensify and similar companies claimed to have achieved with their "AI". I find it somewhat comforting to know that they lied and it was mostly manual!

Ah so _that's_ why it was so good.

So often I find these 'AI' systems are just smoke and mirrors. You have a great system, nobody is interested. Sprinkle on some 'ai' magic beans, and people are now throwing money at you.

It was just boring old Natural Intelligence.

I remember working on a call center that did their bill reviews, it was all poorly compensated people

Reply on news.ycombinator.com