A few days ago, I was awfully proud of myself, because I made my first working product using AI. It wasn’t much of a “product“, but it was a webpage that I really needed which would normally have cost me hundreds of dollars to have someone make. Armed with ChatGPT, little old me did it for free in about five minutes.
I have cautioned myself about cranking out AI-based pages left and right, though, for one simple reason: even with the pro-level AI service that I pay for, it is slow, slow, slow. I was reminded of this just now when I wanted to ask a simple question about my mortgage. I asked Grok.
It cranked and cranked and cranked away and eventually just gave up. I tried three more times with this incredibly simple problem, and it just puked.
I then tried it with ChatGPT. It took shockingly long as well, although it did eventually give me an answer.
The thing is, I could go to the web THIRTY YEARS AGO and find a mortgage calculator page and get what I needed, but here in 2026 (which has an Internet which is, oh, about five billion times more advanced), it can bring a webpage to its knees.
Every day I see items on Twitter talking about this-or-that financial analysis one can do with AI, and I will probably bring some here to Slope, but I gotta tell ya, considering how the response times are measured in minutes instead of milliseconds, it’s going to be a while.
