I’ve spent a lot of time the last week digging into AI, using Anthropic’s Claude/Opus 5.5 model. A friend who runs a small company wants me to give him some advice, so I needed to get deeper into the real workings of AI applications. I have to say, I’m impressed. Working in a company now would be a very different experience that just a few years ago. It’s like the change we went through with cell phones and the Internet. When I started work, for travel I used paper maps and had to stop along the way at a pay phone to call anyone. Doing research meant finding/buying books. I used to travel with a big bag of books – some reading for pleasure, some for business and learning. Good thing I was young and strong back then.

Then suddenly, it was all at our fingertips. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, information became fluid. I didn’t need books for everything; lots of information became available and searchable online. And communications became universal – talk to anyone, anytime, from anywhere. Gen X or Y doesn’t understand how big a shift that was – they’ve never known anything else.

Now what’s happening is that I no longer have to search for anything via a search engine. Any of the frontier LLMs can answer any question I have via a simple conversation – voice or typed – in seconds. And I mean some deep, complex questions. Anything. And the same LLM can do a whole helluva lot of the basic work I used to have to do, only months ago. Write things, analyze financial data, create reports, spreadsheets and presentations…all the stuff that used to slow us down. This is a very large inflection point, maybe the largest. I haven’t even gotten to expert level yet, and I can already work 5-10 times as fast as a couple of years ago.

Anyone working with their hands – carpenters, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, dentists, welders, landscapers – their world won’t change much. But those of us who (used to) work in office settings, our days filled with time online and in meetings – that world is about to get disrupted in a big way. It’s rather profound when you think about it.

Just this week I’ve used Claude/Opus to create a personal financial plan; to create a business plan and a schedule for technology development; to teach me more about how it (Claude, the LLM) actually work; to analyze thoroughbred horse racing and confirm my strategy of betting on jockeys and trainers, not simply horses. There’s almost no limit to what you can get help with. So yeah, profound and impressive.