In yesterday’s post, I calculated the profitability of public software companies. To calculate these figures, I built a little Rube Goldberg machine.
I didn’t download the data into Excel. Instead, I complexified things by sending the analysis to 4 AIs to see if they would agree.
The inspiration : many companies have used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to crowdsource tasks, & pick a consensus answer across three workers to improve accuracy.
Why not try this across 4 AI workers instead?

Prompt : “calculate the average net income margin and cash flow from ops margin from this data set” plus the data set. Note that CFOM isn’t a simple average but requires dividing cash flow from ops by revenue beforehand.

Model
NIM, %
CFOM, %

Claude
4.99
27.31

Gemini
-9.29
16.2

Perplexity
-8.67
14.4

ChatGPT
– 9.29
1,433.01. / 14.9%

My Analysis
-9.29
16.2

Gemini scored top marks for tabulating correctly on both columns. ChatGPT did well with NIM but “forgot” to complete the additional division step, which I corrected with a follow up, but still not the right figure. The other systems missed the mark altogether.
It would be a mistake to draw any broad conclusions from my little experiment.
But in this case, consensus doesn’t yet work as a strategy which means I still need to double check calculations myself.
At some point, AI will mechanize the illusory Mechanical Turk & I’ll restart my Rube Goldberg math machine with confidence.
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