AI is Finally Transformational for Us

JP Conklin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:32:58 GMT

March 2026

Last week, I decided we weren’t moving fast enough to keep up with progress on the AI front. At Pensford, I formed an internal AI team. At LoanBoss, I shut the engineering and product team down for the month of March (which I am calling March Madness) to do nothing but learn Claude Code.

Beware the AI Sales Pitch - Part 2

JP Conklin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:22:13 GMT

October 2025

Last week I talked about companies adding "ai" onto their company name and pretending to be an AI company. But in my own experience with AI models, math can be tricky. I walked through a straight forward fixed vs floating analysis where interest results were not only wrong, but inconsistent when asked the exact same way.

Beware the AI Sales Pitch - Part 1

JP Conklin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:10:31 GMT

October 2025

We are training our model to help optimize interest rate decisions, and a key component of that is to audit previous decisions. If we can easily audit previous decisions, it can help us make smarter ones going forward.

The AI Flash Boys

JP Conklin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:52:20 GMT

November 2026

Maybe the very first catchphrase about AI was early 2023, shortly after ChatGPT had launched. The company we had used to build an AI abstract tool for SREOs repeated this phrase at every meeting.

The Most Impactful 36 Months in Human History?

JP Conklin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:45:30 GMT

December 2025

On Friday December 2, 2022, I received the following text from my brother: “I’m going to be out of a job.”

My brother, or Dr. Conklin as he wants me to refer to him at Thanksgiving dinner in front of mom, is a real estate professor at UGA. The tenure means it’s nearly impossible for him to lose his job.

Plagiarism scandal? The UGA real estate school shutting down? His horrific student reviews finally catching up to him?

No. The text included a link to something called ChatGPT.

I clicked on it and got an oddly simplistic search bar looking thing. I don’t remember what I typed first, but I remember it took about 3 questions before I asked something incredibly challenging - a pattern I saw repeat itself with everyone else I knew, too.

Simple. OK, that was decent. Little bit harder. OK, cool. Super hard. Whoa, mind blown.

I got nothing done for the next week. Research. Analysis. Stupid poems. I switched over to Wall-E for images. We were in San Diego at the time and I had it create an itinerary complete with dining options. Is this how the first people on the internet felt?

I sent it to everyone I knew. I wasn’t the only one. ChatGPT had over 1 million users within 5 days (and I was one of them!). FaceBook had taken 10 months. TikTok 9 months. ChatGPT was one weekend.

The genius was in the simplicity. No training. No implementation. No rules. Just type whatever popped into your head and let it do its thing.

Sam Altman is on every show espousing OpenAI’s mission to “benefit humanity” and that ChatGPT will forever remain a non-profit.

Today, ChatGPT has over 800 million active users. If ChatGPT was a country, it would be the third largest in the world. And that’s just one company. As I reviewed the past 36 months, what struck me most was the pace of change. There is a snowball rolling down a hill effect here, but I suspect that is my brain looking for a linear analogy that isn’t actually appropriate for exponential change.

2023

January - Microsoft invests $10B into ChatGPT

February - Google panic-releases Bard, which promptly provides the wrong answer on a live demo. Google stock drops 9% in one day and I learn what an AI hallucination is. “Does that mean some of the answers it’s been giving me might have been wrong?”

March - ChatGPT 4 launches and scores in the top 10% on the bar exam. Anthropic releases Claude, which strikes me as less fun but more accurate. The huge SREO abstract project I had done at the end of 2023 is largely worthless. What a waste of money.

April - Will Smith spaghetti video goes viral, with everyone suddenly feeling very good about their job security. I remember thinking, “ummmm, someone typed a few words into a text field and it made a video…are we sure this isn’t a game changer?”

May - ChatGPT hits 100mm active users, Hollywood writers go on strike. As adoption takes off, I learn what a “training window” is and which models have the most up to date info.

June - ChatGPT releases its first “agent”, which a tool that actually takes action. I try to have it book a vacation and it fails miserably.

July - NVIDIA, a total unknown to anyone outside hardware nerds, says chip demand has gone vertical. Market cap goes from $300B to over $1T.

August - ChatGPT launches an enterprise version, promising to not train its models on proprietary data. Sam Altman winks at the camera while making the announcement.

September - ChatGPT releases WALL-E 3, which improves videos but still can’t spell correctly in images.

October - Amazon, LinkedIn, and others release AI writing models. I’m now convinced my job is at risk, just like my brothers. November - Sam Altman fired by the OpenAI Board. 745 out of 770 employees sign a letter saying they will quit if he’s not reinstated. Big money backers orchestrate Sam’s reinstatement and the Board is completely replaced. This in no way contributes to Altman’s god complex…

November - Sam Altman fired by the OpenAI Board. 745 out of 770 employees sign a letter saying they will quit if he’s not reinstated. Big money backers orchestrate Sam’s reinstatement and the Board is completely replaced. This in no way contributes to Altman’s god complex…

Anthropic Giveth and the Government Taketh Away

JP Conklin — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:01:53 GMT

June 2026