AI-infused

Posted by Paul Korm
Sep 30, 2025 at 08:57 PM

Anthropic today issued some video about Claude Sonnet 4.5, and its ability to ingest financial statements and produce an acquisition analysis, recommendations, plus executive briefings. Pretty neat trick. But, in all my years doing acquisition work and working with trained senior analysts, I would never have believed a machine model, no matter how clever, would match the depth of real-world experience held by the humans who were able to suss out the red flags purposefully hidden in the numbers. I’m not saying Claude’s a fraud, but I do worry that lazy bosses looking to save a buck will trust the Claudes of the world while bypassing the undefinable skills of human analysts. We will always need great robotics and great human brains working in tandem, not in replacement, with their relative skills. I don’t care what people do with AI in academia in the humanities, etc., but I do care about how decisions are made in fields that affect our physical quality of life.

Tech M&A guru Ben Evans wrote in a recent news letter about “profound naïvety”:

“OpenAI published a paper trying to create a library of discrete tasks done by expert, experienced white-collar workers, and then benchmarking LLMs against them. Conclusion: AI will have parity with industry experts sometime next year. There’s a profound naivety in these kinds of analyses, that act as though you can reduce the job of someone in their mid or late 30s to ‘how well did they make that PPT/XLS/DOC?’ and ignore everything else they do, and why they do it, and indeed what exactly went into that document. It reminds me of the joke about the physicists who are asked to predict which horse will win a race, and they say “First, we presume the horse is a perfect sphere…”