The more I hear about companies shifting to focus on AI the more it makes me want to start a direct "successor"/"competitor" company that does what the original company did without shifting to AI. As a bet on the AI enshittifying the original company so much that they either cannot develop the software any more and have to start anew, or that they create so many errors and chaos that they get fined & sued into oblivion, or both.
Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
51–60 of 205 posts
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#52The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.
Ultimately, taxes is just filling out a spreadsheet and doing basic math... but the hard part of taxes is understanding how to fill out that spreadsheet correctly. Doing that requires answering several questions that many tax filers may simply not have the background to understand--I'm always struck whenever answering the question about "do you need to correct your W-2?" is how would I know when the answer is "yes."…
tbf doing taxes is way more than copy from W2; paste into 1040. There are tax credits. Tax incentives. 1099 income (which a lot of people receive!). Loopholes. So many loopholes.
As far as I understand it, a lot of this guidance can be/has been automated programmatically. I can see how LLMs can become useful for niche scenarios if you feed it *a LOT* of data as they become more accurate.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#53The absolute last thing I want in the filing of my taxes is non-determinism.
This. An important property of tax calculations is being consistently reproducible. In the context of an audit, the calculations don’t need to be accurate per se just precise.
I have a formative story where a large industrial company was counting things for tax purposes using my software. Given the same data and same binary, the count was off by one depending on if it was running on Intel or AMD CPUs. They didn’t care so much what the count was, they just needed it to be the same value at all times in all places so they could defend it in an audit.
The inability to consistently reproduce the value was a bigger liability for tax purposes than small variances in accuracy that fell out of the process.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#54I'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 you use TurboTax, you are part of the problem.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#55I'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…
Stop being a "happy customer". We shouldn't be paying in the first place.
https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#56Earlier 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…
And there are basic things that shouldn’t be subjective at all but that the IRS refuses to give a clear answer to, like if/how the SALT cap affects deduction for NIIT. There are at least 3 possible interpretations and no consensus.
That's because it's law, and the IRS doesn't get to decide that, courts do.
There are parts of the tax code that mean different things in different parts of the US because of conflicting circuit court decisions that haven't made it to the Supreme Court.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#57Why are other outlets quoting the CEO as having said that the layoffs have "nothing to do with AI"? Is TC distinguishing between using AI versus building AI products? > "None of it had to do with AI," Goodarzi told CNBC's Jim Cramer on "Mad Money." "Everything was about how do we become more effective." https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/intuit-ceo-says-companys-17p...
Seriously, the article says exactly the opposite.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why? What's wrong with some non determism if Intuit foots any mistakes? I am all for AI auto filling taxes where the filer offering takes the burden.
To be honest I'm kinda sceptical that they will be paying fines for you.
Software licenses usually explicitly disclaim all financial damages. I assume Intuit does too (I don't use Turbotax myself).
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#59I'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'm a happy TurboTax customer for over 25 years.
I've been using TurboTax for about 20 years now and I am not happy. I hate it with a passion, it has more dark patterns than even LinkedIn and with my basic W-2 tax return with HDHP I managed to hit all their 'know issues' 4 years in a row. They of course offered me to upgrade several times during the 'work flow' to make up for it.
I loathe the existence of Intuit and I still have some hope that a future administration will kill it by having the IRS implement a basic digital product for federal tax filing for the 90% of people who use the standard deduction. Intuit should not exist in its current form in any civilized country, it is a form of cancer which only exists because our politicians are a bunch of greedy fucks.
Re: Intuit to lay off over 3k employees to refocus on AI
#60I'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…
Why pay for tax software? What's wrong with the free tax submission website?