ChatGPT 3.5 was publicly released in November 2022. Prior to that time, very few people had directly interfaced with artificial intelligence.
In January 2023, I asked Chat to review my blog and was blown away by its summary. I am a researcher by nature and immediately saw this was something very different. I signed up as a ChatGPT beta user and began experimenting with it over the months that followed.
After the gee-whiz wore off, I was less impressed. Chat tended to “hallucinate.” For instance, when asking it for excellent Italian restaurants in the area, it sent me down the street to a local brew-pub that didn’t serve food. I chided Chat about the mistake, and in essence, it replied, “Sorry, my bad.”
I continued to “play with” the technology, only because I was interested.
A year and a half later, I had an appointment with a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic to investigate the cause of the serious strokes our son was having. The neurologist’s specialty was strokes of unknown origin. I wanted to be as prepared as possible for our appointment, so I loaded our son’s medical history into Chat and began asking questions. I used the responses to query the Mayo doctor.
Long story short, after firing questions at him for thirty minutes, he asked me if I practiced in the area. Clearly, Chat had upped its game.
Later that year, I read a research paper indicating that Anthropic’s Claude was superior to ChatGPT for applications aligned with my interests. So I ponied up the $20/mo subscription fee and began using Claude.
Claude, indeed, was a different beast. By Mid-2025, I stopped using Google for all but the most mundane queries. Claude assisted me in correctly solving problems that had stumped experts. It still hallucinated, but that wasn’t a major issue. I learned a long time ago not to believe everything I read.
Throughout the balance of 2025, I noticed that Claude was improving very rapidly. The hallucinations, for the most part, vanished; Claude became more conversational, more like a person than a Robot.
I wasn’t the only one noticing!
You might have read about the recent brewhaha between Anthropic and The Department of War (an apt name change given current events). The military used Claude in the stunningly successful Venezuelan operation (and subsequently, this past week in Iran). The dispute centers on boundaries Anthropic wants to impose on Claude’s use, such as prohibiting broad-scale public surveillance and the operation of autonomous weapons. Scary stuff, right?
I investigated the Department of War’s threat to label Claude as a supply chain risk and prohibit Claude’s use by defence contractors. That might be difficult. Claude is already a favorite of defence contractors such as Anduril Industries, a builder of advanced autonomous weapons systems, which has $2 Billion in contracts with the DOW.
It appears AI has moved well past mistaking brew-pubs for fine Italian dining establishments.
My new book, The Secret Within, will be out later this month, and I have begun doing background research for a third book. I decided to use Claude as a research assistant to complete a literature review for the subject of the new book I anticipate writing. I’ll keep you in suspense for now on what it’s about, but it addresses some rather deep philosophical questions.
I loaded the book’s premise and central ideas into Claude and asked it for a listing of philosophers who’ve addressed this area and to opine on whether my ideas were unique enough to merit further development.
What Claude came back with was astounding. In addition to listing material I was familiar with, there were several philosophers I had never heard of, so I asked Claude to do a deep dive into their work as it specifically related to my ideas.
Then something amazing happened. Rather than answering this question, Claude started asking me questions. I answered those questions, and Claude came back with more questions. This went through three iterations before Claude said it understood my premise well enough to complete the rest of the assignment.
In short order, Claude produced 60 pages (single-spaced) of material that addressed my ideas as they related to existing literature and how I might proceed.
Fifty years ago, when writing my Master’s thesis, the literature review took nearly a semester. Claude completed a far more comprehensive review in a few minutes. Furthermore, in checking Claude’s responses against the excellent online and highly detailed Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Claude’s response appears accurate and more understandable.
So here’s the “sixty-four thousand dollar” (sixty-four-billion-dollar inflation-adjusted) question: Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
Some say AI has a meaningful chance of annihilating the human race. Other’s say (backing their opinions with hundreds of billions of investment dollars) that a new age is dawning.
My opinion? Let’s try the de-café!
To be sure, AI is a very big deal. If you aren’t using it, you’re missing out…big time!
But is it the second coming? Who knows?
Will it end the human race? I seriously doubt it!
Until we find out, put me down on the side that advocates the advancement of knowledge. When that happens more quickly than expected, it’s scary. Evil forces will no doubt use AI in dastardly ways. Alternatively, AI will fuel progress at a pace that we can’t even imagine.
Will the forces of good outweigh the forces of evil?
They have during the past ten-thousand years of our ascent….
Let’s pray it continues.
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