Anyone using AI for their modeling?

As a former programmer in IB, no. financial modeling is meant to be auditable and reproducible by peers, superiors, 3rd parties, etc. and AI is generally a black box - the exact opposite of that.

I have heard that programming (not even AI, just like number crunching in python or something) is becoming more slowly more common at l/s hedge funds, but even then it doesn't replace core financial modeling in excel (is at most a way to supplement and confirm an existing thesis). And you'd probably need a really forward thinking and technical PM to not tell you to fck off when you propose to pull out python for anything

I disagree with above. LLM can generate VBA codes, and Excel is essentially a human-friendly UI on top of bunch of unreadable, hard-to-comprehend VBA code. So this is how it will work: LLM generate VBA code based on natural language prompts, than Excel converts VBA code into human-readable format ( traditional financial models - tabular UI with math formulas ), then human do adjustments such as fixing inappropriate stuff generated by AI blackbox, then the LLM in the background utilized reinforcement learning to reflect on real-time human feedback ( which is the adjustment that human made to the model ) such that LLM won't fall for the same mistake twice, and it will only get better the next time. This entire thing hasn't been built yet but it's theoretically possible, and there's a start-up doing this stuff.