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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

> Accounting professionals will be able to spot trends and patterns that would have gone undiscovered without AI, thanks to AI’s capacity to handle enormous amounts of information rapidly and precisely.

What exactly is the accounting professor talking about here? What can handle enormous amounts of accounting information rapidly and precisely?

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Presumably ChatGPT is better at writing database queries or answering questions about a large Csv file than somebody who doesn’t know how to program. This was the subject of a PR talk last week be an openai cofounder - https://youtu.be/C_78DM8fG6E - my guess is something like that is what inspired this article.

Even if they could handle accounting information precisely, large language models are anything but rapid. How many trillions of floating point operations would be needed to add two numbers correctly?

Maybe AIs will be able to parse useful numbers out of a mess of documents in a year or two. The actual handling of the numbers will probably be left to less intelligent algorithms for the foreseeable future :)

> What can handle enormous amounts of accounting information rapidly and precisely?

The piece of code that AI writes.

For instance "how can I find all transaction pairs whereby an equal amount is debited and credited, but three to five days apart?"

AI will respond by writing the query in the accounting system's query language (and not actually trawl through the data itself).

Tangential to your comment, but I can’t help but imagine the end result will just be deeper levels of needless complexity.

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