The Great Device AKA The Great Rectangle

Motto: “You catch more #textnecks with miniature light emitting diodes than with honey.”

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔OpenAI launched a new personal finance product on Friday, letting ChatGPT Pro subscribers connect their bank, brokerage, and credit card accounts through Plaid. Users can link to over 12,000 institutions including Schwab, Fidelity, Chase, Robinhood, Amex, and Capital One, and ask ChatGPT questions about spending, portfolio performance, and future planning.

OpenAI says more than 200 million users already ask financial questions to ChatGPT monthly. The launch follows OpenAI's acquisition of personal finance startup Hiro last month, and comes a week after Perplexity launched a similar product for financial research. OpenAI plans to support Intuit integration soon, which would let the model analyze the impact of stock sales on taxes and the odds of credit card approval.

My Take
Connecting an LLM to your bank account is one of the worst risk-to-reward propositions I have seen in this cycle. Hallucination rates on financial queries have been documented at 20% or higher in third-party testing, ChatGPT has a public track record of confidently giving wrong answers about tax law, account fees, and investment products, and the user base for a tool like this skews toward people who do not have the financial literacy to catch the errors. Plaid is a legitimate connection service, but Plaid handling the authentication does not solve the problem of what happens after the model starts giving advice on what to do with the money.

The bigger issue is the data side of this. Once you connect Chase, Fidelity, and Amex to ChatGPT, OpenAI now has a real-time view of your income, spending, debt, and investments, which is the most commercially valuable behavioral profile any company can build on a user. The product is currently free for Pro subscribers, but the long-term monetization play is not going to be the subscription itself. It is going to be the data leverage that comes from being inside the financial lives of 200 million people, which is the same play Google made with Gmail twenty years ago and the same play Meta made with Facebook Connect.

If you are a Pro subscriber considering this, my advice is the same as it would be for any new financial tool. Read what you are signing, understand who owns the data, and remember that LLMs are not licensed financial advisors and have no fiduciary duty to you when they get something wrong.

Hedgie🤗

[Cal @wyattyhalpert]

This is a little known piece of knowledge for the Reels generation, but scenes used to have many other scenes attached to them, and you were required to watch all of them - we called the combination ‘movies,’ and sometimes some scenes were good but more were bad.

[Sharbel @sharbel]

> you buy an Echo for $29.99
> you put it in your bedroom. your kid's room.
> "Alexa, play music"
> Amazon hires thousands of people to listen to your recordings
> they hear families. arguments. children alone in their rooms.
> your voice makes advertisers pay 30x more than your browsing history
> Amazon's ad business: $46.9 billion
> the FTC fines them $25 million. that's 4 hours of ad revenue.
> in 2025, Amazon removes the only setting that kept your voice off their servers
> you didn't buy a speaker. you bought a microphone.

[Adam Draper ⏻ @AdamDraper]

accidently typed in https://t.co/fZZR8SPMIS instead of gmail, and its my new favorite website.

[The Great Device AKA The Great Rectangle @TheGreatDevice]

@Gravantus It WAS fun, mind you...

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

> walk around your city catching pokémon
> game asks you to scan a fountain. sure why not
> 30 billion scans later
> niantic owns a more detailed map than any government
> sells game for $3.5B
> spins off a spatial AI company
> your pokéwalk is now classified infrastructure
> delivery robots now navigate using your walks
> you were never the player. you were the product.

[The Great Device AKA The Great Rectangle @TheGreatDevice]

@TheMiamiApe Forever. 🥰

[𐌕 @fwtimini]

It annoys me that Google knows where I live, my Wi-Fi password, my browser history, all my interests, but it’s been asking me for 20 years if I’m a robot.

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

These are actually the most free and honorable people on this site

[Vagif Aliyev @vali_turbo]

@Abhinavstwt Finally somebody is not chugging the Kool-Aid. All I see here is about how all devs are getting fired but nobody talks about how without actual controls these AI code editors produce the most ridiculous slop that I've ever seen in my life.

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

This is real

[🇨🇭🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿InLucysHead🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇨🇭© @InsideLucysHead]

I uninstalled Facebook as I got depressed seeing my friends' posts about their relationships and marriages...Instagram

I uninstalled LinkedIn as I got depressed seeing my colleague post their job change and promotion.

I uninstalled instagram as I got depressed seeing my friends travel and enjoy their lives.

But I'll never uninstall @X because you guys are more miserable than I am.

[Sami Gold @souljagoyteller]

No comment

[Dan Douglas @dandouglas]

interested in the long-term effects of this jacob’s ladder-ass phantasm setting up shop in your three-year-old’s brain. probably fine

[The Great Device AKA The Great Rectangle @TheGreatDevice]

@InsideLucysHead ☺️☺️☺️