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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

#161

Post by Citizen_Lame »

shantnutiwari wrote: post #155
zknill wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know? There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.

>>There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement. Thank you for saying this, I keep arguing the same. "This is llm" has become lazy for "I dont like this so I will pretend its llm"

That's because most of the LLM output is associated with low effort spam, and they are not wrong. You keep fighting for LLM rights, lol.

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

#163

Post by dinkumthinkum »

nly wrote: post #138
arwhatever wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Claude Code to prepare my personal income tax return this year, and so far the IRS hasn’t come after me. Had Claude generate yaml files for the input/source documents, then had it generate code to process the return into output yaml files. Manually typed the results into the IRS Free File Forms website, and was pleased to see that it did some input validation. Had it generate Code modules to match the IRS form…

Still blows my mind that Americans have to do this. In the UK almost nobody needs to "file their takes" and if you do you just do it online without the need for software.

Maybe its because in the UK, you are basically just giving all of your money to the government so there is nothing to work out.

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

#164

Post by mancerayder »

zknill wrote: post #112
bloppe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was written by AI

How do you know? There's a lazy habit from some folks to say something they either disagree with or don't understand was "written by AI" without backing up that statement.

"You're absolutely right to question that.

Let me restate that correctly. Just facts. No fluff."

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

#165

Post by philipallstar »

jcranmer wrote: post #33
kstrauser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> Law doesn't work like that

This is partly because the law predates compilers and modern communication. Why should a crime get different sentences? Often because judges are humans and somehow that makes it okay to lock some people up for years longer than others.

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

#166

Post by WarmWash »

0xffff2 wrote: post #85
WarmWash wrote: post #50

Gemini and GPT did my (non-trivial) taxes this year. They're going to be laying off way more than 3k people.

How does this work, concretely? Do you just upload your W2/1099s/etc and prompt it to "do my taxes"? I imagine it's not that easy, but filing my (trivial) taxes with any of the well known tax prep services is easy enough that the LLM version can't get very much more complex than "do my taxes" and still be an improvement.

Upload all the needed forms, upload the forms to be filled, but output instead to a spreadsheet instead of trying to get the model to fill out the .pdfs. I then manually filled out the forms from the spreadsheets.

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

#167

Post by jcranmer »

philipallstar wrote: post #165
jcranmer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

> Law doesn't work like that This is partly because the law predates compilers and modern communication. Why should a crime get different sentences? Often because judges are humans and somehow that makes it okay to lock some people up for years longer than others.

Your example is somewhat apropos because one of the more algorithmic portions of law is sentencing. Since the 1980s (i.e., after the development of compilers!), the US has enacted guidelines for sentencing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Federal_Sentenci...) that allows anyone to read the criminal complaint and compute the expected sentence via a calculator (e.g., https://www.sentencing.us/).

And yet the sentencing guidelines are not binding on outcomes, in part because of the necessary flexibility in law. Sometimes you crunch the numbers and you get absurd results (SBF's fraud conviction is a good example I ran through myself), and so you need the flexibility to throw the algorithm out when the algorithm produces wrong results.

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

#168

Post by nunez »

gamblor956 wrote: post #76
nunez wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are actually very few "loopholes" available to individuals. What most accountants call "loopholes" are actually just misunderstandings of the tax rules (e.g., the home office deduction, home business expense deductions, hiring family members being some of the biggest), and their clients usually end up paying penalties the IRS if they get audited.

Or tax situations that aren't taken advantage of! There are folks who are definitely brave about using those deductions, but there are also people that can who don't. That's what I meant by "loophole" here.

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

#169

Post by testing22321 »

bni wrote: post #78

As a European I don't understand why this company exists at all.

Everything in the US is done to make money, for someone.

Education. Healthcare. Prisons. Even filing taxes is a profit centre for someone.

It’s not a very successful country. It’s a very successful business.

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

#170

Post by hnfong »

kstrauser wrote: post #25
nerdsniper wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> except that the entire law isn't defined in one place > These things are knowable There are absolutely undefined, unknowable areas of law that are waiting on future SCOTUS decisions to be defined. Heck, we can’t even rely on past SCOTUS decisions. Even in extremely well-defined law like whether LEO’s have valid PC to search someone during a traffic stop, two different judges in the same district will disagree and a…

I agree. I just mean, you can pretty well know today's state , at least hypothetically. But you better be watching tomorrow's legal news to see if anything important changed.

Well, to put it precisely, an omniscient being would theoretically be capable of knowing today's state of the law with probabilities assigned to the results.

I'm serious. Pick any non-trivial issues of law, ask a world leading expert, and you'd very quickly hear the word "probably" somewhere. Less often than "it depends", but you'll hear those words often nonetheless.

If that's "knowable" to you, I guess it's knowable.

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