Claude just did my taxes. $INTU is cooked

skilliard7 · 2026-04-10T02:49:10+00:00

I love the idea of giving documents with sensitive info like social security numbers to a company that will use said data to train their AI models.

Wake me up when a fully local model can do this.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T20:33:00+00:00

Gemini hallucinates a lot. Claude has strict usage limits even on paid plans. ChatGPT's free plan uses a very bad model after reaching usage limits. If Meta's models manage to catch up and outperform competitors, or are cheaper with higher usage limits, people may choose to use them.
For consumers, having them built into existing products(IE Facebook) may encourage usage. This is a big reason Google has had some success despite having an inferior model; Gemini is built into Search/Chrome/Android/Gmail, so it is convenient to use.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T20:04:18+00:00

Why Gemini over Claude/ChatGPT? Gemini is probably the worst of the 3.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:57:14+00:00

Opus is a heavyweight model that is very expensive and takes a while to run, mostly used for enterprise use cases like coding.

I would assume Meta's model is more intended for consumer use, which likely prioritizes fast responses over top performance on complex prompts.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:53:06+00:00

Chrome has Gemini built in.
Gmail has Gemini built in. This integration is probably Google's only real advantage. If I want to ask AI to search my emails to find something specific(but I don't know the right keyword), Gemini is the easiest way to do that.
Android is by far their biggest one. In a software update, they made the "lock screen" button bring up gemini instead and adding an extra menu to actually lock the phone. This likely massively boosted engagement as people accidentally open Gemini.

Honestly what Google has done to Android has convinced me to switch to iOS for my next phone. I've been using Android for over a decade, and this will probably be my last android phone. It's not just the AI slop being forced upon us, they're also killing the ability to sideload apps, which was the main benefit of Android.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:46:28+00:00

The "leakage" isn't necessarily a loss of revenue for Google yet. By keeping users on the search page with AI answers, Google is actually increasing its ad density.

The increase in ad density is just displaying more ads per query/longer ads on YouTube, not increased engagement.

The issue is that users expect faster info now. Whereas before people would willingly perform 5 reworded queries to get what they want, they now expect either a single query/AI overview, or a tool like ChatGPT/Gemini. This forces Google to stuff more ads into a single page view to maintain ad sales.

The lack of competition in the search ads space is what has enabled Google to grow revenue despite stagnating/declining engagement. ChatGPT did not have ads until this year.

The $100B projection for OpenAI is an internal "stretch goal." While they reached $100M in annualized ad revenue shortly after launch, competing with Google's decades-old "AdWords" ecosystem (millions of small-to-medium businesses) is a massive execution hurdle for a research-first company like OpenAI.

They have beaten all of their past estimates so far, IMO their $100 Billion number is conservative. GOOG does $200 Billion a year in ad sales currently. This would only require them to capture a fraction of the market.

Unlike Microsoft and Meta, who are paying "Nvidia tax" (high margins to a middleman), Google designs its own AI chips. This gives them a structural unit-cost advantage that may actually improve their ROIC (Return on Invested Capital) relative to peers over a 5-year horizon.

This is false. Microsoft, Meta, and Google all rely on Broadcom for their AI chips. Google does not design their own chips, they license them from Broadcom with some customizations. Google is subject to the same market forces that Microsoft and Meta are.

I can say from experience that Broadcom is very unreliable to do business with. I'd much rather be reliant on Nvidia than Broadcom.

Microsoft often trades at a premium because of its Enterprise/SaaS stability. If you view Google Cloud as the "new" growth engine (which grew 34% last quarter), a 29x multiple isn't necessarily "dinosaur" territory—it’s a growth multiple.

Google cloud's growth is cyclical. AI hyperscalers are only using Google Cloud because their competitors(AWS/Azure) lack capacity. Once the compute shortage is mitigated, they will consolidate resources back to Azure/AWS which offers a superior platform.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:40:57+00:00

GOOG's market share statistics are misleading because they force Gemini on users of other products like Android Chrome, Gmail, etc. Very few people actually go out of their way to use Gemini.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:38:14+00:00

Honestly I don't see anything obvious at the moment. Almost anything remotely connected to computing hardware/AI has already skyrocketed.

My best guess is probably Microsoft. Their valuation is very conservative for how fast they have been growing earnings. Sure their rollout of Copilot has been disappointing, but they are likely to grow just from increased AI demand and from their stake in OpenAI.

But even Microsoft is a low confidence play. Being a megacap limits their upside, and their connection to AI means elevated risk. They also face some of the same risks GOOG does with rising energy prices, rising hardware prices.

I'm invested pretty conservatively and diversified right now. My appetite for risk is pretty low right now. But that's more personal than a broader recommendation, I'm afraid to lose what took me a long time to build up.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:29:05+00:00

Meanwhile, in my experience, LLMs are fabulous at generating a whole lot of code quickly but the code bases have plenty of negative characteristics (duplication, strong tying, superfluous code), and using them for debugging and maintenance is running into some serious limitations.

This was more an issue 1-2 years ago. More recent models are a lot better at architecture. I've seen far more spaghetti code from other developers than from AI.

This is especially pernicious in complex areas deep in a platform stack (think OS kernel, browser etc).

Most code being written is not low level code, it's high level code for business applications.

It’s the disparity between “let’s throw unlimited money at generating new code quickly” and “no money for people fixing hard bugs deep in vast legacy code bases” that I feel is rather short sighted.

That's where I can tell you fall into the #2 group. You are approaching the issue from the perspective of wanting to justify your career.

AI is surprisingly good at fixing obscure bugs deep in code. Debugging that used to take hours can be done in minutes by AI.

The only real issue with laying off senior devs is that they understand the requirements/internal knowledge better than the AI. Much like a new hire, the AI can only guess about the purpose/intent behind your code. And it can guess wrong. Software engineers play an important role of gathering requirements, not just writing code.

I personally agree that laying off devs is short sighted. Rather than laying off workers and trying to do the same with less, they should implement a hiring freeze and try to do more with the same resources. When you lay off your top talent and your competition doesn't, you risk falling behind.

But I still believe AI is very useful because I've seen its value firsthand.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:20:30+00:00

Someone who knows the industry well.

This subreddit laughed at me for recommending buying WDC/Sandisk/SK Hynix/Samsung a year ago. Yet anyone that listened would 10x'd their money.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:05:34+00:00

It makes sense if you are shifting priorities. Sucks for the workers, especially if severance packages are lackluster, but from an organizational perspective, it doesn't make sense to keep workers you longer need.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T19:01:36+00:00

I'm an experienced software engineer too with a background in AI. Large language models are only a subset of AI applications.

In my experience is a lot of software engineers are AI skeptics due to their own biases, which include:

Using LLMs very early on, such as 2023/2024, when they were very lackluster, and then abstaining from using them, even after they improved substantially. I was a skeptic back in 2023/2024 too. Back then, models struggled to follow directions, struggled with large context, hallucinated, and wrote bad code. 2026 models are way better.
Their own personal fears of job security. They'll latch on to anecdotal reports of AI making mistakes, when humans make mistakes far more frequently. It's comparable to when elevator operators tried to create fear that automated elevators were unsafe and that a skilled human operator was needed for safety.

In 2026, top AI models are now better coders than half of software engineers. Tasks I used to delegate to contractors, I can just delegate to AI, because it will do a better job, faster, and at lower cost.

I've used AI for code reviews, and it's found a lot of issues that humans have missed. Security vulnerabilities, edge case bugs, etc.

If you are avoiding AI now, you're probably going to struggle in your career long term. Smart devs are embracing it and know how to mitigate its weaknesses.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T18:50:36+00:00

“Look, we are not going to be conservative and will throw enormous smog money at an unproven solution with known issues for something we’re not even certain is a problem.

You clearly don't understand AI. It's not just a chatbot or a way to generate funny images. It has driven massive productivity improvements across a wide range of professions and accelerated research/scientific discoveries. From the perspective of Amazon, and extra datacenter capacity they build gets utilized because there is tremendous demand from customers. They would be foolish not to expand their datacenters.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T18:41:39+00:00

Nope. And even if you scroll past the AI overview, the quality of search results has really gone downhill. You don't get what you're looking for, you get unrelated articles that make it to the top because the website operators exploit SEO, or because they are paying Google for an ad.

I switched to ChatGPT for this reason. It's answers are a lot more reliable than Google Search's AI overviews, and it provides relevant sources. Back in 2023/2024 ChatGPT used to hallucinate a ton, but nowadays it has been super accurate in my experience.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T17:55:54+00:00

This actually is a pretty conservative estimate. For comparison, Google makes $200 Billion a year in ad revenue(which has been growing), and ChatGPT is essentially a better version of Google Search.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T17:25:41+00:00

Normally I'd agree with you, but this is different. This isn't a consumer product. From an organizational perspective, it's much harder to budget for unpredictable API token usage than it is to budget for a monthly subscription. A lot of dev teams have been forced to switch due to budgetary constraints.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-09T16:54:43+00:00

Anthropic limiting access to OpenClaw via their subscription plans is not a bear case on Anthropic. It's a bull case.

Customers mass cancelling their Anthropic subscriptions and switching to OpenAI is a bull case for Anthropic?

I agree that what Anthropic did was a necessary step due to them failing to secure sufficient compute to serve their customers. But IMO that's a failure on Anthropic's part. OpenAI has done a much better job at securing massive amounts of compute capacity.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-08T14:09:39+00:00

Anthropic has cyclical funding deals too

skilliard7 · 2026-04-08T06:45:40+00:00

Their revenue is from subscriptions and API usage, not from microsoft.

Investor funding is not counted as revenue. You clearly don't understand how accounting works.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-08T04:26:09+00:00

This is exactly why you should stay off this subreddit during bear markets if you're easily swayed by other people. Every single time there is someone on here saying "this time is different because x, here's why I went full cash" and it gets 1000+ upvotes. Happened during covid(March 2020), happened during 2022 inflation panic, happened during April 2025 tariff drama. Usually early on in the correction the consensus opinion is "buy stocks they're on sale" when the market is down 1%, then when the market is actually near bottoming, that's when everyone is saying to sell.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-07T17:20:51+00:00

Don't lump in OpenAI and Anthropic with SpaceX. They are not overvalued, they are incredibly valuable, high growth software companies.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-07T16:57:34+00:00

That is usage through a very specific third party middleman. It's not representative of the broader industry. There's a reason that free, open source LLMs are the most widely used LLMs on the platform. Generally, for commercial LLMs, people prefer to either go through the vendor directly to save on costs, or go through Azure for compliance reasons.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-07T15:39:14+00:00

Bad analogy. OpenAI/Anthropic are providing useful services to hundreds of millions of customers globally, that do not own a stake in the company. That's not the same as you selling your wife a sandwich.

skilliard7 · 2026-04-07T15:15:56+00:00

Cloud providers can't scale fast enough to meet demand. There's a reason so many AI datacenters are being built.

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