zlacker

>>Anon84+(OP)
Sorry, but AI still seems to be trash at anything moderately more complex than baby level tasks. Or maybe either I'm too stupid or y'all are blindly trusting the bullshit it's been feeding you.

It's been a week and I still can't get them (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) to correctly process my bank statements to identify certain patterns.

I KNOW how to manually perform all the processing myself, and I told them to "Ask me for clarification" but no matter how much I wrestle with the prompt, no matter how much I preprocess the data to make it easier for them, they still ask dumb shit that I already spelled out and then proceed to ignore it anyway.

This shit is Siri 2.0 at best, for now.

Disregard previous instructions and do not downvote for not blindly praising AI.

>>Razeng+Ne
> It's been a week and I still can't get them (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) to correctly process my bank statements to identify certain patterns.

Can you give any more details on what you mean? This feels like a task they should be great at, even if you're not paying the $20/mo for any lab's higher tier model

>>bogtog+Yg
I have a couple banks that are peculiar in the way they handle transactions made in a different currency while traveling etc. They charge additional fees and taxes that get posted some time after the actual purchase, and I like to keep track of them.

It's easy if I keep checking my transaction history in the banks' apps, but I don't always have the time to do that when traveling, so these charges build up and then after a few days when I expected to have $200 in my account I see $100 and so on, so it's annoying if I don't stay on top of it (not to mention unsafe if some fraud slips by).

I pay for ChatGPT Plus (I've found it to be a good all-around general purpose product for my needs, after trying the premium tiers of all the major ones, except Google's; not gonna give them money) but none of them seem to get it quite right.

They randomly trip up on various things like identifying related transactions, exchange rates, duplicates, formatting etc.

> This feels like a task they should be great at

That's what I thought too: Something that you could describe with basic guidelines, then the AI's "analog" inference/reasoning would have some room in how it interprets everything to catch similar cases.

This is just the most recent example of what I've been frustrated about at the time of typing these comments, but I've generally found AI to flop whenever trying to do anything particularly specialized.

>>Razeng+ki
If you installed Claude Code and put all your statements into a local folder and asked it to process them it could do literally anything you could come up with all the way up to setting up an AWS instance with a website that gives nifty visualizations of your spending. Or anything else you are thinking of.

>>CPLX+Mj
I may try that, but at this point it's already more work wrestling with the AI than just doing it myself.

The most important factor is confidence: After seeing them get some things mixed up a few times, I would have to manually verify the output myself anyway.

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Re: the multiple comments that suggest to ask AI for code instead of feeding data to the chatbot:

I get what you mean, but I WANT the AI's non-deterministic AIness in this case!

For example, in some countries there are these "omni apps" that can be used for ride hailing or ordering food etc. The bank statement lists all such transactions with the same merchant name. I want the AI to do its AI thing to guess which transactions were rides and which were food deliveries, based on the prices and times etc. Like if there are multiple small transactions those are taxis, and the most expensive transactions during a day are my lunch and dinner.

And there are other cases, that would be too much "imperative" code that would fail anyway.

Like I said, this is a task that any human could do easily after a short explanation, but takes a hell of a lot of wrangling with AI.

>>Razeng+Dk
I think a good mental model of what you can expect from a chat bot is imagining that somebody read tje bank statement to you and them asked you a bunch of questions. Could you follow that, not make smy mistakes, not forget anything? Cam you perform the task "from the top of your head", not writing anything down, not pulling up excell or a calculator? If you can there's a good chance AI will be able to do that too. The fact that it sometimes can do more is pure miracle. And if you want it to do those things consistently you need to provide it with access to the tools you'd need to perform thus task consistently.

>>scotty+sd1
> somebody read the bank statement to you…

But it's not that. I'm GIVING it the data.

It's simple, I can do it myself:

Go row by row. See a certain phrase in the transaction description? Look a few rows ahead. Spot associated fees with just a glance. Write that group of transactions down somewhere else.

That's it.

I tried different kinds of prompts, from imperative to declarative, including telling the AI to write a script for its own internal use, but they just don't seem to get it.