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order-matterstoday at 1:43 AM1 replyview on HN

at risk of sounding facetious, how exactly do you catch an error in a sum without performing the sum yourself?

How do you verify that all the tariffs are properly allocated to the correct GL code without going through the invoices and checking for each tariff on the list? How do you make sure none were accidentally assigned to other GL codes? All you have is pdfs, you dont know what the AI did or didnt do with the info on the pdf, there are not many use-cases to catch its errors without doing the work yourself.

If anything, it's going to add a step to these "kids" work where they have to use the AI to do the work and then redo 90% of the work anyway just to verify the output and then AI is going to get the credit anyway.

Or the overworked people are going to use AI and not verify it, which means not catching any errors or hallucinations, which apparently is fine because someone claims it's a solved problem for the black box of infinite possibility and inconsistent output.


Replies

scottyahtoday at 3:42 AM

It's like self-driving cars. You might want to accept human fault error rates until we prove overwhelmingly that the software is near-perfect, but others might want to switch to a system once it proves that it reliably beats most humans by a large factor, then work to mitigate the common errors it does have and improve.

When management signs off on work (SOX requires CEOs and CFOs to personally certify the accuracy of financial reports), they do not personally 'verify that all the tariffs are properly allocated to the correct GL code' or nearly any other hard numbers. The world works with human-level best effort, and management of that risk. I'm sure additional checks will be developed to categorize that risk, but the entire field of finance is about analyzing and pricing in risk so I think it'll work just fine.