If You're an Investor, You Should Play with AI

If you invest in anything (public markets, private markets, whatever), you need to be playing with AI. Not reading about it. Not watching demos. Actually using it, building with it, getting your hands dirty.

Here’s why.

Your mental model is already stale

The world is changing so fast right now that your understanding of what’s possible will not update unless you’re using these tools. And I don’t just mean ChatGPT or Claude in a chat window. I mean coding agents: Claude Code, Codex, the tools that actually let you build things and automate workflows. They’re more flexible, more revealing, and they’ll change how you think about what software can do.

If you’re still forming your AI thesis from analyst reports, you’re behind.

You’ll see gaps the market doesn’t

When you use the APIs directly, you develop intuitions that are almost impossible to get secondhand.

Here’s a real example. About a year and a half ago, I was using Google’s API heavily (their 1.5 Flash model at the time). It wasn’t great at coding, but it was surprisingly good at summarizing, scraping data, and creating structured outputs. It was efficient and it was cheap. Meanwhile, the market was absolutely hammering Google’s stock. The consensus was that they were hopelessly behind in the AI race.

But I was sitting there thinking: these guys are not that far away on the model game. They clearly had an execution problem, not a model problem. The underlying capability was decent and improving fast.

I also used Serper a lot for data scraping. And if you look under the hood, Serper is going to Google for its results anyway, another small signal that Google’s infrastructure was more embedded than people realized.

None of this was a sophisticated thesis. I wasn’t deeply technical on model architectures. But these small data points from actually using the products gave me a different view than the market had. I took a sizable Google position and it worked out really well.

Tokens are a lens on the economy

When the first thinking models came out (the ones that reason step by step), I noticed something obvious if you were paying attention: they use a lot more tokens. Way more. And if models are consuming dramatically more tokens per session, that means more compute, which means more demand for memory.

So I bought memory stocks. I actually begged a friend in Korea to buy SK Hynix for me because I couldn’t buy it from the U.S. That worked out too.

The edge is in the using

I had a chance to do a few more similar trades in the past 18 months. When you use these tools daily, you develop a feel for what’s real and what’s hype, which products are genuinely useful and which are demos dressed up as products.

Right now, for instance, Microsoft is getting hammered. I use Microsoft’s APIs and products regularly. And this time, I don’t have the same contrarian conviction I had with Google, however.

The point is simple: being close to the technology and actually using it will give you insights you cannot get from the outside. If you’re doing any kind of investing right now, public or private, this is probably the single biggest edge available to you. And it’s free. You just have to start building.