I’m 60. I studied computer science in 1984.
Back then, it took me many weeks just to write the graphics code to draw a few rectangles on screen. I gave up, switched to a business degree, and walked away from computers for decades.
Last week, AI wrote me a financial risk report of my investment portfolio with suggested follow-up actions that was so good, I had to read it three times.
Here’s what changed my mind.
In 2018, I watched the award-winning AlphaGo: The Movie documentary and something clicked. With enough data, the ceiling disappears. China understood then that data is the new oil and turbocharged its AI initiatives.
In 2021, I did a full-time 6-month IBM AI course. Then ChatGPT landed in late 2022, and the AI race was on. Since then, AI has reshaped how I invest, how I write, and how I think.
So I went looking for the best tool out there. After months of kicking the tyres across Grok, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity and others, my answer was clear: Anthropic’s Claude.
Two weeks into the paid version, here’s what blew me away.
Memory. I turned it on, and Claude quietly built a profile of who I was. It keeps improving, I can edit it anytime, and the whole thing lives in a portable file I can paste into any AI. My persona, on tap.
Skills. This is the Neo-in-the-Matrix moment where a new Kung Fu skill is just a download away. I downloaded a “how-to” skill from the web, and typing “/how-to” before my prompt turns Claude into a step-by-step personal advisor that asks me the right questions before answering. I’ve used it for investment analysis and to choose the EV car I want. I have had so many lightbulb moments.
Automation. I built an agent in a few steps that drafts a daily financial news summary and drops it into my Gmail, ready to review. I managed to edit my school reunion video autonomously. I wrote an initial draft of this article before I let Claude fact-check the data and reword it as a LinkedIn post.
Then there’s the story behind the company itself.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by people who left OpenAI. Last month, it raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, and has confidentially filed for an IPO.
Here’s the wild part. FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried was an early backer, putting in $500 million for an 8% stake in 2022. When FTX collapsed, the estate was forced to sell that stake for about $1.3 billion. That same 8% would be worth roughly $77 billion today after 4 years. Selling early costs them around 150 times their money.
You can’t buy Anthropic yet as it’s private. But here’s a side door: Google owns about 14% of Anthropic. And as a bonus, Google also owns about 6% of SpaceX, which just IPO’d this month at a $1.77 trillion valuation.
I refuse to be an AI dinosaur. As Thanos says, “AI is inevitable.”
If a 60-year-old uncle can pick this up and run with it, what’s your excuse for not starting today?
What’s the first thing you’d ask an AI to build for you?
#AI #Claude #Anthropic #LifelongLearning #Investing
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