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Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

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Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#31

Post by mistrial9 »

dtnewman wrote: post #24

1) this article doesn't really cite that this is due to AI. It cites a reuters article which in turn cites an internal memo, which says that they need to be focused, with AI being an important initiative. So the title is a bit misleading. 2) A lot of comments here talking about turbotax. Remember that intuit also has quickbooks. Personally, i think the uses for AI in doing my taxes are limited. I don't want AI making…

this company Intuit is going to train their internal models on your data and other customers too. In order to train useful models in aggregate, they will ingest your very specific PII and you will do "nothing" about it. The entire set of tax paying citizens (almost) are now going to have their financial-legal lives ingested into models you cannot see, cannot use yourself and do not derive income from, IMHO.

ps- small caveat to this personal information doomerism is that very wealthy and capable people will have this happen to them and their companies, and that will possibly set off some kid of hardball.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#32

Post by kev009 »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #16

I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…

I've been using it out of laziness because I know it will import the previous year. But it is pretty buggy and getting worse, they clearly want you to move off the desktop software.

If you look at the actual generated tax forms, there's a lot of extra pomp around filling out some pretty trivial forms and worksheets. If they cut the desktop software I think I will just move to something like https://www.freetaxusa.com/.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#33

Post by jcranmer »

kstrauser wrote: post #17
crowcroft wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a very common misconception among programmers that the law is a sort of natural language 'program' where you can consistently deduce that x input generate y output.

It sort of is, except that the entire law isn't defined in one place. "Hey, do I have a home office?" Well, "home" is defined over in this regulation, and "home office" is defined over there in that other regulation, and "having a home office" would normally mean this except for this case law that says it can also mean that when these other circumstances apply, and... These things are knowable, but unless you've spen…

Trying to treat law as code-in-English-form is going to lead you horribly astray, however.

The behavior of C code is something that we can, in principle, reduce to semantics in a formal model we know how to describe the behavior of. Now, there's some issues getting there--the specification is more ambiguous than we'd like, and there's definitely certain behaviors that are very challenging to incorporate in a formal model (say, signal handlers). But even something like UB is something that we have good, well-understand models of what exactly it means to hit UB. At the end of the day, whether or not C code is correct, whether or not the compiler is correctly compiling the C code, is a question that has a clearly objective answer.

Law doesn't work like that. Laws are written and interpreted with the understanding that there is flexibility in the mater. If you compute the law and get an absurd result, then people are going to shrug and throw out the absurd result; rather different it is to a compiler where the absurdity is accepted as correct. As a result, there's not really an objective answer to whether or not something is legal, to understanding what will happen in a legal case, like there is to code.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#34

Post by kburman »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #16

I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…

> If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it.

This isn't actually about AI. it's just classic human psychology.

You’ve had a rock-solid workflow for 25 years, so it makes total sense to be cautious and reject features you don't need.

Right now, keeping it at "arm's length" and "read-only" feels safe. But that's usually just phase one. Once that initial trust is established, those boundaries naturally start to melt away. Give it a couple of tax seasons, and you’ll probably find yourself wanting it to take on more of the heavy lifting.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#35

Post by LamaOfRuin »

BobbyTables2 wrote: post #11
kstrauser wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy, do I have bad news for you. Edit: To be clear, as a sibling post said, the basic arithmetic is easy enough. It's the tax opinion stuff that is absolutely not deterministic. If your situation is even moderately complex, there's a vast number of ways to describe your deductions, each with different tax implications and multi-year requirements. I'm not talking about being Jeff Bezos, either. Is your spouse an indep…

I know my own taxes pretty well. I don’t follow the tax code changes but could fill out a 1040 form on my own. Even did for a short time. I use tax prep software because I do NOT want to worry whether I copied the amount from line C to line K correctly. The IRS forms are a nightmare! The postscript in PDF should allow something more sane than what we have today in IRS forms, but that’s just wishful thinking.

The IRS's fillable forms do a perfectly fine job of copying values around and doing the basic arithmetic that they can automate.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#38

Post by tanjtanjtanj »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #16

I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…

Your experience is way different from mine.

I had some very basic "double check" type questions about my very straightforward taxes I threw at the bot because it was handy and it didn't seem to know that it was even related to taxes or tax software and literally directed me to seek out someone who might know about taxes. I then asked it about the weather and it was able to talk freely about that, just seems like they're reselling another model with a different prompt up front or a RAG.

Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI

#39

Post by ForOldHack »

kburman wrote: post #34
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #16

I'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years. The standard workflow of TurboTax hasn't changed much. You go through a work flow filling out forms. I don't use any of the OCR and little of the importing. I'm happy to type in numbers from forms myself. So normally I wouldn't have any use for AI, but they added it anyway. This year I asked it a couple of "Why" and "What If" questions, and it was actually useful. If i…

> If it stays at arm's length, and if it can "read only", then I am OK with it and actually somewhat pleased with it. This isn't actually about AI. it's just classic human psychology. You’ve had a rock-solid workflow for 25 years, so it makes total sense to be cautious and reject features you don't need. Right now, keeping it at "arm's length" and "read-only" feels safe. But that's usually just phase one. Once that i…

We have an app for that. Would you like me to write a new one?

I could feed a lot of posts into ELIZA...

Yes, A rock-solid workflow for 54+ years.

And ELISA.BAS is still running strong. Its just classic human psychology.

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