Meet Your New Finance Intern: GPT-4

The finance intern—a tale as old as time. They work 100 hours a week, snort Adderall in the bathroom, and wear boat shoes in December. For this, they demand $160K a year. Now there is a new breed of intern that'll get you the numbers you need without the snarky attitude.

In fact, it's really friendly, it never sleeps, and it costs 20 bucks a month. It's still mind-bendingly stupid every once in a while though. I’m talking about GPT-4. 

I think that with existing AI tools, a finance professional can increase their individual output by 50%. Workflows that require entire teams will collapse into one dude’s afternoons. It means we need far less entry-level or outsourced staff at banks, consulting firms, and investment funds. The software programs that are so dominant in finance today may be reduced to mere data storage programs. 

Today I would like to show the results of two of my experiments that have taken my thinking here:

1. Analysis: How you can use ChatGPT to build models, analyze P&L statements, and then build visualizations
2. Synthesis: How you can use Anthropic’s Claude to quickly parse through 10-K documents

Don't get too excited about GPT making you a ton of money via stock picking. Instead, its first job will be automating the tedium of analysts’ lives with improved workflows. While this is distinctly less sexy than stock picks, it has far bigger implications. By changing the types of labor that a finance professional does, it dramatically changes the skills sets of those who succeed in the industry. You need to be paying attention, the world is changing fast.

Analysis

As my colleague Dan argues, GPT-4 is a reasoning engine. Think of it as the world’s smartest and dumbest intern: It can do more than you think but tends to make up stuff if your directions are unclear.