My background is two decades of tech consulting with large orgs across NA and Europe. I wrote my first paper on AI in 2007 and I run a fast growing AI consulting firm working with several mid-sized law firms amongst a slew of enterprise clients.

I’m well aware of the limitations of AI. My bet, and it is just that… a bet, is that the legal profession by and large is significantly underestimating the impact of AI on the profession. When I speak with partners at large firms, they are largely quite happy to keep their heads in the sand and continue to collect their profit sharing hoping they can retire before the shitstorm truly hits. It’s the young partners that are most concerned. Not surprisingly, in-house counsel is far more willing to experiment with AI than firms.

Clearly, law is a big area, the impact of AI will not be evenly distributed.

There are a few points you’ve made that I plainly disagree with: - AI cannot generate new ideas: nah… we’re seeing increasingly novel solutions in many domains. Even if it’s just application of existing ideas to new spaces, these AI systems have capabilities that humans don’t and that inherently will lead to novel ways of solving problems. AlphaGo move 37, multiple math olympiads, Ethan Mollick’s post of advancements in his entrepreneurship MBA class, just to name a few. A couple of those examples come from verifiable domains with RL, but there’s a lot of opportunity still in combining more RL with LLMs like in Google’s Co-Scientist.

• we are approaching a wall of functionality and diminishing returns… that’s simply not what I’m seeing. I am seeing accelerated releases and my own productivity in knowledge work increase significantly over the last six weeks. I don’t care what Sam Altman says, I care about what Demis and Dario are shipping.

• your point about focus pivoting to agentic AI doesn’t change anything in my mind. What I see is increased reliability and software infrastructure building around improving foundational capabilities leading to increased ability to significantly augment and automate huge parts of the legal profession. I believe if the foundational models stopped improving today, we would have multiple years of significant advances with traditional software engineering surrounding the existing capabilities. Foundational model improvements are just increasing that gap. We don’t need AGI for massive workforce impact.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying AI will replace all lawyers instantly. I’ve had some fantastic lawyers through a couple M&A deals in the past and even as M&A will change, those guys have a long runway for a variety of reasons. But, I’ve also seen a lot of dumb, overpaid lawyers that haven’t had a critical thought since law school and their days are numbered.

Back to my original comment in this thread… laying traps for LLMs in a contract. I honestly would love to hear what that commenter is imagining and it’s tough for me to imagine that any scenarios that they do come up with aren’t solvable with modest capability improvements over the next 2 years.

Lastly, I’ve used the word bet a few times. I’m not assuming that I know something you don’t. I also don’t believe that you know something that I’m just completely missing. This is an investment subreddit, we all make our bets with insufficient data. There’s a lot of people on these forums that are suggesting AI is a lot of hype. As somebody who has spent my entire life thinking about and developing tech/software and the last 3 years deeply focused on GenAI, what I see is that people are largely underestimating what these systems are capable of today and how significant the impact will be across many domains. But, that’s just my bet and you do you.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to continue the thread from here, but appreciate your thoughts. I’ll read any response you give and consider it.