Congratulations to AI:
It can write sonnets, hallucinate legal opinions, and deepfake your childhood.
But ask it to pull real numbers from an SEC filing—and it short-circuits like a Roomba in a rainstorm.

As this Washington Post article highlights, the new study from Vals AI isn’t just a bad report card.
It’s an indictment of the entire "trust the vibes" economy.

For years, tech execs and venture capitalists have breathlessly promised that AI would replace analysts, lawyers, teachers, and even your mom’s book club.
Turns out, it can barely Google properly when stakes are real and data isn't hand-fed.

Because here’s the truth no one’s putting on stage at TED:

AI demos are dioramas.

AI benchmarks are rigged races.

AI job-replacement fantasies are clickbait for investors who can’t tell a regression test from a regression line.

Most of the time, AI isn’t doing "research."
It’s autocompleting your dreams back at you.
And in industries like finance—where facts matter—"autocomplete" isn’t disruption. It’s malpractice.

The real scandal isn’t that AI fumbled the tasks.
It’s that billion-dollar companies keep selling these glorified autocomplete engines like they’re nuclear physicists in a can.

"It'll replace your workforce!" (Translation: It'll struggle to find EDGAR filings that a hungover intern could locate in three clicks.)

"It’s superhuman at reasoning!" (Translation: It can talk itself into wrong answers more confidently than ever before.)

The gap between the marketing decks and the real-world performance is not a bug.
It’s the business model.

Meanwhile, the AI arms dealers keep optimizing for conversationality—because feeling smart sells better than being smart. (There are brilliant teams chasing real advances — but the marketing departments are louder.)

So here we are:
An economy run by hype cycles.
A workforce gaslit into thinking they're obsolete.
A tech elite more focused on gaming leaderboard apps than building usable tools.

Maybe AI will eat our jobs someday.
But today?
It can barely finish its homework.