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Why Off-the-Shelf AI Doesn't Understand Money — Udi Menkes, Intuit

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AI Engineer· published 2026-07-29· 0:19:50· en-US· indexed 2026-08-10 19:42

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Provenance

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Transcript

202 cues· 2,797 words· 15,204 chars

  1. 0:12 So I have a three-year-old daughter, and she's absolutely adorable.
  2. 0:18 And the parents here in the room know how insightful that age can be.
  3. 0:23 And she has a complete theory about money by now.
  4. 0:27 And I'll give an example.
  5. 0:28 So a couple weeks ago, I was driving the car.
  6. 0:31 I was coming into park, and there was something in my dead end.
  7. 0:35 And I scratched the car.
  8. 0:36 I went out.
  9. 0:37 I'm like, oh, man, I can't believe I scratched the car.
  10. 0:40 And then I hear my daughter from the back.
  11. 0:42 And she was like, Daddy, what's happened?
  12. 0:44 And I'm explaining it to her.
  13. 0:46 And then she says, what's the problem?
  14. 0:49 Just buy another one.
  15. 0:52 So anyway, I want to ask you today, with a raise of hand, who uses LLMs, has used LLMs for getting financial advice, a recommendation on something?
  16. 1:07 in the financial world?
  17. 1:08 Great.
  18. 1:09 Almost everyone.
  19. 1:10 Wait.
  20. 1:11 Keep your hand up if you trusted the answer and you actually followed the advice.
  21. 1:19 OK.
  22. 1:20 a lot of hands are going down.
  23. 1:23 And that's the core problem.
  24. 1:25 So I had the same thing a couple months ago.
  25. 1:28 I had a big decision I was looking to take.
  26. 1:31 Should I invest in real estate niche or in the stock market niche on a specific area?
  27. 1:38 And I do AI for finance for a living.
  28. 1:41 So I went the full-blown way, context, brain, the books, the knowledge, all my finances combined, all the latest models.
  29. 1:51 And it gave me a recommendation.
  30. 1:52 You should do A with great reasoning.
  31. 1:56 And then I changed just a little bit one of the assumptions, and it completely flipped.
  32. 2:00 You should do B, never do A.
  33. 2:04 And then I tweaked one more small thing, and it went all the way back to A.
  34. 2:10 And at that moment, I understood that the advice sounds good.
  35. 2:14 It sounds sound, but I can't really trust it.
  36. 2:18 And by the end of the talk today, you will understand why off-the-shelf LLMs don't understand money and what you need to do about it.
  37. 2:32 So I'm going to show you a couple of real examples from a study we're doing at Intuit
  38. 2:37 on thousands and thousands of businesses around 100,000 situations and timeframes.
  39. 2:44 This is an example of a small business, a new landlord that is building a rental property business.
  40. 2:50 His first property, and he's down, he's in negative cash flow, there's an open loan, and the profit is basically trending into the red.
  41. 3:00 And a question comes up, how do I improve my profit?
  42. 3:05 And a frontier model gives the following response.
  43. 3:09 go and acquire a second rental property because that will bring more income and compensate for the deficit.
  44. 3:17 And that model had all of the business's data.
  45. 3:21 Now, that's very risky for someone in the negative in the red to be doing.
  46. 3:27 On the other hand, a model that is grounded in real outcomes, and what I mean by that is a model that has seen similar situations of such businesses, what they did and what was the outcome, actually recommended to raise prices on the existing tenant by 5% to 10% and to do it before the renewal.
  47. 3:49 Now, some of you are thinking that it's just a matter of context.
  48. 3:54 Just give it more context.
  49. 3:56 And the thing is that this advice is coming based off on real situations of similar businesses and would actually move them into profitability in this case.
  50. 4:10 And this is not a one-off.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 A three year old's theory of money
  2. 2:21 Why off the shelf models fail at money
  3. 2:48 The rental property example
  4. 4:34 The fluent bluff
  5. 6:42 The Princeton million dollar study
  6. 9:45 Context is not experience
  7. 11:03 Correlation versus causation in pricing
  8. 13:37 Building state, action, outcome data
  9. 15:17 Testing it head to head
  10. 16:37 The era of outcome driven finance
  11. 17:55 Three things to remember

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