You will be able to explain why figures from an assistant may be out of date even when they sound current.
Kelvin was working out how much to top up his CPF this year for the tax relief. He asked an assistant for the current cap on the relief for cash top-ups and the monthly salary ceiling for CPF contributions, and got two clear figures with a short explanation of each. He had them in his spreadsheet before it occurred to him to wonder what "current" meant to a program that had finished learning some time ago.
When he checked, one figure matched the CPF Board website and the other had been right a couple of years earlier.
Every language model is trained on a large collection of text gathered up to a certain date, its training cutoff, and learns nothing new from training after that. It doesn't know about rule changes, new schemes, revised rates or anything else that happened later. AI fundamentals lesson 4.4, Find the edges of what a model knows, covers this in general.
There's often a further gap. Models are released some months after their cutoff and then used for a long time after release. So on the day you ask, the model's picture of the world may be one or two years old, sometimes more, and it won't necessarily tell you.
Worse, the model doesn't know which of its facts have gone stale. It learned an old rate in the same way it learned a definition that never changes. Both come out in the same confident tone, as lesson 1.1, What an assistant is actually doing when you ask about money, warned.
This would matter less if money rules were stable. In Singapore, many of the figures you'd act on change regularly, and the agencies that set them publish the new ones.
CPF interest rates on the different accounts are reviewed and announced by the CPF Board on a published schedule. The CPF contribution rates and the salary ceilings that cap contributions have been changed in stages in recent years. Income tax reliefs and rebates are reviewed in the Budget each year, and IRAS publishes what applies to each year of assessment. Each new issue of Singapore Savings Bonds has its own interest rates, published by MAS. Housing grants, the CPF retirement sums and schemes for specific groups all get revised.
So a figure from an assistant isn't just possibly wrong. For a lot of Singapore money facts, it's likely to be one or more revisions behind, because the facts keep moving and the model stopped.
Kelvin's stale figure was the salary ceiling, which had moved since the assistant's training data was collected. The assistant had no way of knowing, and it gave the old figure with the same calm certainty as the one that was still right.
Many assistants can now search the web before answering, and that does help with stale facts. But it brings a different problem. A search returns pages, and the assistant chooses which to read and quote. It may pick a personal finance blog post from three years ago, a forum thread, or a news article about a proposed change that was later revised, instead of the official page.
Old blog posts are particularly risky for Singapore money questions. Popular topics such as CPF top-ups, SRS and Singapore Savings Bonds have many articles written about them, and the older ones stay in search results long after their figures go out of date. An assistant that searches can land on one of those and present it as current.
If your assistant searched, look at what it found. Is the source an official site, such as cpf.gov.sg, iras.gov.sg or mas.gov.sg? Is there a date on the page, and is it recent? If the answer cites a blog or a news article, treat the figure as a lead to follow up on the official site.
All this leads to one rule, and it doesn't have exceptions. Any rate, cap, limit or threshold is a look-it-up item. You get it from the official source every time you're about to use it, even if you looked it up last year and even if the assistant gave you the same number.
This doesn't mean the assistant is useless for these questions. It's very good at telling you which figures you'll need. Ask it "what figures do I need to check before topping up my CPF for tax relief?" and you'll get a useful list, covering the relief cap, the annual limit and whether your top-up qualifies, with each value left for you to find.
The same rule applies to the figures in this course. Where a lesson mentions a rate or a cap, it deliberately points you to the official site instead of quoting the number.
Think about the money figures that affect you this year, the ones you'd actually act on, and where each one is published.
List five money figures that affect you, such as a contribution cap or a tax relief, and write where the current value is published.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).