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This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all

This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. But this is “just another an AI cycle” and if you’re a practitioner it does look different than the previous ones. However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies. What you are actively seeing happening now are institutions saying “we have to change the way that we practice” “the way that we did business before is no longer as applicable as it’s going to be changing very rapidly in the future and we’re going to have to deal with that.” That is not coming from investors or technology companies. That is coming from people who are utilizing this stuff and being impacted by it So it is absolutely the case that there’s going to be some kind of financial changes but just like every other AI cycle we are left with a aggressively more capable technology that is more pervasive. Everybody needs to be taking that seriously.

rayiner 3mo ago
AI is a real thing and it's the most significant development in the legal sector since the Internet. Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery, which before would've taken me the whole day. Even if it never gets any better it's a huge step forward. It's not only going to change legal education, it's going to change what the pipeline looks like in law firms. Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction.
- vouaobrasil 3mo ago
  Indeed - it helps people become much more efficient. When it comes to law, that includes criminals as well. Whatever gains in efficiency happen on one side, they happen on the other too. Yes, everyone loves to say how they coded a cool side project in a day instead of a week, but what of the situation where AI is placed in a situation with two sides going against each other. The same old fight, but with better weapons.
- ElProlactin 3mo ago
  > Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction. Taking law as the example, I'm not sure I agree. Legal is largely a distress purchase. Very few clients actually want to spend time interacting with outside corporate counsel, a divorce lawyer, a personal injury lawyer, etc. The real value of an attorney is accountability. A person with a license and reputation who is on the hook for the advice they provide. But accountability is only worth buying if the judgment behind it is sound, and that judgment takes years to build. The problem is that much of what makes a "good" lawyer comes from years of doing unglamorous work as a junior, financed by clients. If AI reduces the ability of firms to subsidize training the next generation of lawyers, you get fewer "good" lawyers and the whole market keeps eroding. From what I've seen, the top AI models can now produce contracts that are on par with what I would have had to pay thousands of dollars for a decade ago, and the agents/chatbots are capable of collaborating with you to address fairly complex issues. If you have the money, you still run everything by a real attorney of course for the accountability piece, but the future is not bright for contract attorneys because people know even they're probably using AI to do half their work.
  - anon373839 3mo ago
    > From what I've seen, the top AI models can now produce contracts that are on par with what I would have had to pay thousands of dollars for a decade ago How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it. > you still run everything by a real attorney of course for the accountability piece Your attorney can make better use of AI than you can. A growing time sink for lawyers (and I assume, physicians) is having to explain to clients that "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you," and "no, that's not actually how X works in practice."
    - ElProlactin 3mo ago
      > How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it. I ran multiple businesses for over 20 years, and during that time had to deal with countless contracts involving commercial transactions, leases, funding events and employment. I worked closely with outside counsel, and had to deal with numerous disputes and lawsuits. Many contracts are boilerplate to begin with, which is why firms like Cooley and Orrick provide free document libraries and generators. They know that a huge segment of the people who might retain them aren't going to pay $10,000 for an NDA or a simple commercial contract. So they give documents away as a marketing tool, hoping that it might get them more complex work in the future. Attorneys can add value when you have a unique wrinkle and of course when there's a dispute, but, as an example, if you need an employment contract for California, you don't need to pay someone $500/hour to draft one from scratch and frankly for many contract categories, you'd probably be taking on more risk by having a bespoke contract drafted than modifying a solid, widely-used template. > Your attorney can make better use of AI than you can. A growing time sink for lawyers (and I assume, physicians) is having to explain to clients that "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you," and "no, that's not actually how X works in practice." You're not wrong, but I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. First, as far as contracts are concerned, the leading AIs are more than capable of producing pretty decent ones for many categories because they've been trained against all the real contracts that are out there. Your "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you but..." scenario is real, but it applies less and less than attorneys want to believe, especially when the subject is mundane. Second, the bigger issue is that AI is fundamentally hindering the development of the next generation of lawyers. It's great that senior associates and partners can use AI to be more efficient, but the economic pressures AI creates mean that it's far harder for law firms to have clients subsidize the training of the next generation of lawyers. So the question isn't whether an experienced attorney today can make better use of AI than you can, it's whether a new attorney today will be able to become a "good" lawyer when AI is eroding their firms' ability to have clients subsidize their training.
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  > Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery It might be worth distinguishing between LLMs as tools for fuzzy-searching hard facts, versus using them to craft logical arguments. [0] The risk-profile and verification difficulty are rather different. [0] Or, more-precisely, using them to craft a pattern-fitting text artifact, which hopefully maps onto a sane concept when reinterpreted by a human.
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    I’ve used Opus and Grok (in the last month) to make some logical arguments and they’re not usable for that. In one case, the result looked superficially compelling, but the assertions on further scrutiny often proved the opposite of what we were trying to argue (usually due to some textual source where one narrow fact was helpful but the larger thrust of the source cut directly against us). In another case, what the AI selected as the primary argument was correct based on the literal meaning of some document. But in context the literal meaning was obviously not the intended one and it would be borderline sanctionable to interpret the document that way.
KPGv2 3mo ago
> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies. How has crypto been massively impactful?
- TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
  The only way crypto touches lawyers that I can think of is smart contracts, and that's been.. minimally impactful at most.
- cyberax 3mo ago
  Crytobros gave us ransomware, industrialized pig butchering scams, billion-dollar heists, and arguably the second Trump presidency. I'd say it's pretty impactful.
- AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
  I should have used a different example there for sure. Cryptocurrency was impactful but not in the same way The point I’m making is a financial bubble can burst while also massively changing the world
hatefulheart 3mo ago
The bubble is about the market you wally not about whether statistical models are useful. I wish people would stop being so dense.
delusional 3mo ago
> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Yes they were. Educators have been talking about how access to the internet has affected their students learning since forever. We were cautioned and had dedicated classes to teach us to be critical of different sources, teaching us what Wikipedia could and could not be used for. The internet was deliberately turned off for our exams. Crypto too was seen as culturally important, papers were written by otherwise well respected authors. We were expected to read some whitepapers about crypto. Interestingly, reading those papers only made us more sure it was a scam. You're rewriting history to make this moment seem different, it is not.
- AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
  Nobody uses crypto everyday
Ampersander 3mo ago
> Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. This is what people mean when they say it's a bubble.
KaiserPro 3mo ago
I am at a company that currently has a whole bunch of lawyers, because we are dealing with multi-year >100s million infra projects. One of the things that AI has helped with is automatic breech notifications. They are largely proforma, but depending on which generation of contract they are notifying from, subtle changes are needed. Law is mostly highly structured text, and you know what loves highly structured and documented text? LLMs. Legal LLMs do share the same issue with coding LLMs, they tend to default to lazy/insecure. Its not the case where you as a non-lawyer can prompt it to make a "water tight" contract from scratch.
dgellow 3mo ago
> This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble
- rayiner 3mo ago
  > AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble That’s not true. Apple alone is valued higher than the largest three AI companies combined.
  - dgellow 3mo ago
    I don't see how that's related. Apple has high margin on the hardware they sell, extremely optimized logistics, they offer a whole ecosystem of hardware and services. They are in a completely different line of business than AI vendors
    - rayiner 3mo ago
      You said: "AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing." You asserted that AI companies would need "the entire world as their TAM using their services non stop" to justify a few trillion in valuation. Yet Apple has a $5 trillion valuation just selling phones and computers, mostly to consumers and not businesses. Google built a $2 trillion valuation by the end of 2021 mainly on search and ads. Our economy is very large and you don't need to take over "the entire world" in order to justify a few companies with $1 trillion valuations.
      - dgellow 3mo ago

rayiner 3mo ago

AI is a real thing and it's the most significant development in the legal sector since the Internet. Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery, which before would've taken me the whole day. Even if it never gets any better it's a huge step forward. It's not only going to change legal education, it's going to change what the pipeline looks like in law firms. Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction.

vouaobrasil 3mo ago
Indeed - it helps people become much more efficient. When it comes to law, that includes criminals as well. Whatever gains in efficiency happen on one side, they happen on the other too. Yes, everyone loves to say how they coded a cool side project in a day instead of a week, but what of the situation where AI is placed in a situation with two sides going against each other. The same old fight, but with better weapons.
ElProlactin 3mo ago
> Similarly to the changes I expect to see in any kind of white collar job where AI replaces a lot of the data analysis/data transformation work, leaving people to do more human interaction. Taking law as the example, I'm not sure I agree. Legal is largely a distress purchase. Very few clients actually want to spend time interacting with outside corporate counsel, a divorce lawyer, a personal injury lawyer, etc. The real value of an attorney is accountability. A person with a license and reputation who is on the hook for the advice they provide. But accountability is only worth buying if the judgment behind it is sound, and that judgment takes years to build. The problem is that much of what makes a "good" lawyer comes from years of doing unglamorous work as a junior, financed by clients. If AI reduces the ability of firms to subsidize training the next generation of lawyers, you get fewer "good" lawyers and the whole market keeps eroding. From what I've seen, the top AI models can now produce contracts that are on par with what I would have had to pay thousands of dollars for a decade ago, and the agents/chatbots are capable of collaborating with you to address fairly complex issues. If you have the money, you still run everything by a real attorney of course for the accountability piece, but the future is not bright for contract attorneys because people know even they're probably using AI to do half their work.
- anon373839 3mo ago
  > From what I've seen, the top AI models can now produce contracts that are on par with what I would have had to pay thousands of dollars for a decade ago How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it. > you still run everything by a real attorney of course for the accountability piece Your attorney can make better use of AI than you can. A growing time sink for lawyers (and I assume, physicians) is having to explain to clients that "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you," and "no, that's not actually how X works in practice."
  - ElProlactin 3mo ago
    > How would you know? Unless you have expertise in this area, you can't really know if you have a good contract until you have to litigate it. I ran multiple businesses for over 20 years, and during that time had to deal with countless contracts involving commercial transactions, leases, funding events and employment. I worked closely with outside counsel, and had to deal with numerous disputes and lawsuits. Many contracts are boilerplate to begin with, which is why firms like Cooley and Orrick provide free document libraries and generators. They know that a huge segment of the people who might retain them aren't going to pay $10,000 for an NDA or a simple commercial contract. So they give documents away as a marketing tool, hoping that it might get them more complex work in the future. Attorneys can add value when you have a unique wrinkle and of course when there's a dispute, but, as an example, if you need an employment contract for California, you don't need to pay someone $500/hour to draft one from scratch and frankly for many contract categories, you'd probably be taking on more risk by having a bespoke contract drafted than modifying a solid, widely-used template. > Your attorney can make better use of AI than you can. A growing time sink for lawyers (and I assume, physicians) is having to explain to clients that "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you," and "no, that's not actually how X works in practice." You're not wrong, but I think you're misunderstanding what I'm saying. First, as far as contracts are concerned, the leading AIs are more than capable of producing pretty decent ones for many categories because they've been trained against all the real contracts that are out there. Your "yes, I understand this is what Claude told you but..." scenario is real, but it applies less and less than attorneys want to believe, especially when the subject is mundane. Second, the bigger issue is that AI is fundamentally hindering the development of the next generation of lawyers. It's great that senior associates and partners can use AI to be more efficient, but the economic pressures AI creates mean that it's far harder for law firms to have clients subsidize the training of the next generation of lawyers. So the question isn't whether an experienced attorney today can make better use of AI than you can, it's whether a new attorney today will be able to become a "good" lawyer when AI is eroding their firms' ability to have clients subsidize their training.
Terr_ 3mo ago
> Saturday morning, I spent a couple of hours getting my arms around some discovery It might be worth distinguishing between LLMs as tools for fuzzy-searching hard facts, versus using them to craft logical arguments. [0] The risk-profile and verification difficulty are rather different. [0] Or, more-precisely, using them to craft a pattern-fitting text artifact, which hopefully maps onto a sane concept when reinterpreted by a human.
- rayiner 3mo ago
  I’ve used Opus and Grok (in the last month) to make some logical arguments and they’re not usable for that. In one case, the result looked superficially compelling, but the assertions on further scrutiny often proved the opposite of what we were trying to argue (usually due to some textual source where one narrow fact was helpful but the larger thrust of the source cut directly against us). In another case, what the AI selected as the primary argument was correct based on the literal meaning of some document. But in context the literal meaning was obviously not the intended one and it would be borderline sanctionable to interpret the document that way.

KPGv2 3mo ago

> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Those were massively impactful technologies. How has crypto been massively impactful?

TurdF3rguson 3mo ago
The only way crypto touches lawyers that I can think of is smart contracts, and that's been.. minimally impactful at most.
cyberax 3mo ago
Crytobros gave us ransomware, industrialized pig butchering scams, billion-dollar heists, and arguably the second Trump presidency. I'd say it's pretty impactful.
AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
I should have used a different example there for sure. Cryptocurrency was impactful but not in the same way The point I’m making is a financial bubble can burst while also massively changing the world

hatefulheart 3mo ago

The bubble is about the market you wally not about whether statistical models are useful. I wish people would stop being so dense.

delusional 3mo ago

> However this kind of statement was not released for crypto, or for the Internet. Yes they were. Educators have been talking about how access to the internet has affected their students learning since forever. We were cautioned and had dedicated classes to teach us to be critical of different sources, teaching us what Wikipedia could and could not be used for. The internet was deliberately turned off for our exams. Crypto too was seen as culturally important, papers were written by otherwise well respected authors. We were expected to read some whitepapers about crypto. Interestingly, reading those papers only made us more sure it was a scam. You're rewriting history to make this moment seem different, it is not.

AndrewKemendo 3mo ago
Nobody uses crypto everyday

Ampersander 3mo ago

> Are expectations way too high in the near term for tech companies and all of the crap that they’re talking? 100% totally agree. This is what people mean when they say it's a bubble.

KaiserPro 3mo ago

I am at a company that currently has a whole bunch of lawyers, because we are dealing with multi-year >100s million infra projects. One of the things that AI has helped with is automatic breech notifications. They are largely proforma, but depending on which generation of contract they are notifying from, subtle changes are needed. Law is mostly highly structured text, and you know what loves highly structured and documented text? LLMs. Legal LLMs do share the same issue with coding LLMs, they tend to default to lazy/insecure. Its not the case where you as a non-lawyer can prompt it to make a "water tight" contract from scratch.

dgellow 3mo ago

> This is exactly why all these people talking about a “bubble” I think are misguided. A bubble doesn’t say anything about how useful the underlying technology is. We are in an AI bubble, in the sense that the allocated resources is completely out of line with the underlying businesses. AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble

rayiner 3mo ago
> AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing. What you describe is literally the symptoms of a bubble That’s not true. Apple alone is valued higher than the largest three AI companies combined.
- dgellow 3mo ago
  I don't see how that's related. Apple has high margin on the hardware they sell, extremely optimized logistics, they offer a whole ecosystem of hardware and services. They are in a completely different line of business than AI vendors
  - rayiner 3mo ago
    You said: "AI companies would literally need the entire world as their TAM, using their services non stop to justify the valuations and level of expenditures we are seeing." You asserted that AI companies would need "the entire world as their TAM using their services non stop" to justify a few trillion in valuation. Yet Apple has a $5 trillion valuation just selling phones and computers, mostly to consumers and not businesses. Google built a $2 trillion valuation by the end of 2021 mainly on search and ads. Our economy is very large and you don't need to take over "the entire world" in order to justify a few companies with $1 trillion valuations.
    - dgellow 3mo ago