Analyst angst is real. You spend years sweating over some of the world’s toughest exams, with the odds stacked against passing, only to discover a computer can do the job better.
A draft paper found that generative AI, which mimics (or in this case apparently exceeds) human ability, outperformed financial analysts when it came to predicting the direction of future earnings — and by a comfortable 8 percentage point margin too, said Alex Kim, Maximilian Muhn and Valeri Nikolaev of the University of Chicago.
The real surprise was that the large language model trounced its biped peers without recourse to all the context that informs earnings — sectoral issues and economic backdrop, say, or changes of personnel.