zlacker

Almost 10 years ago, I ran a media sentiment analytics product that worked on hand coding. Everything automated that we tested - and that our competitors tried to launch - output garbage. The status quo for media analysis was either averaging a lot of garbage, or paying an insane amount for a very limited scope. We used automated tools to multiply the hand coders, but there was no plausible lights-out solution if accuracy really mattered.

That's completely changed in the last 18 months. All my colleagues in the industry have switched to LLMs. They're seeing accuracy as good as hand coding was getting (these were generally college educated coders), at scale.

Non-LLM sentiment tools were always a bit of a parlor trick that required cherry picking to survive the demo. In almost every case drilling to the actual statements revealed it was wrong on anything involving irony, humor, or even complex grammar. That's changed almost overnight.

I think the finding that hn is "neutral" about MBAs says all that's needed about accuracy here.