⚙️ Exclusive Interview: How AI will disrupt the legal industry

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Good morning, and happy Friday. I spoke with the CEO of legal AI firm Robin AI about reliable AI solutions and where he thinks the industry is headed. 

Read on for the full story. 

In today’s newsletter: 

AI for Good: Another tool to prevent wildfires

California’s 2020 wildfire season was the largest wildfire season in the modern history of the state. Nearly 10,000 fires burned across 4.3 million acres of land. 

A team of researchers recently applied deep learning methods to study the makeup of California’s forests before that season, and they found a culprit: Tons of dead trees lying among the living. 

The details: The researchers applied deep-learning dead tree detection techniques to a series of sub-aerial photographs from 2020. 

Why it matters: The researchers said that further mapping could “contribute to early warning systems in areas that may face widespread forest mortality in a changing climate.”

OpenAI Briefing: CTO says the models in the lab aren’t that advanced

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told Fortune Wednesday that the company isn’t hiding AGI somewhere in its lab. 

OpenAI last month began training its next frontier model, saying that it anticipates “the resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI.”

In other OpenAI News: The Information reported that neither Apple nor OpenAI are paying each other for the coming integration of ChatGPT into Apple’s OS. 

This is a markedly different arrangement than Apple’s search engine partnership with Google, in which Google paid Apple billions of dollars to be Safari’s default option. This search engine dominance later landed Google in hot water with the U.S. Justice Department for alleged monopolistic behavior. 

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Researcher says OpenAI & ChatGPT are an ‘off-ramp to AGI’

Francois Chollet, a deep learning researcher at Google, said earlier this week that OpenAI “basically set back progress to artificial general intelligence (AGI) by 5-10 years.” 

Chollet’s view, and the view of a growing number of researchers (Gary Marcus, Yann LeCun, Grady Booch, etc.) is that any “reasoning” LLMs might demonstrate is nothing more than an illusion, as it is a direct result of their training data. Chollet’s goal is to build systems that demonstrate real reasoning capabilities — in other words, systems that can solve novel problems not included in their training data.

Chollet at the same time launched Arc Prize, a $1 million competition to try and get AI research “back on track towards AGI.”

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Exclusive Interview: How AI will disrupt the legal industry

Lawyers — costing an average of around $300 per hour — are notoriously expensive. 

And for the vast majority of people, that cost is out of reach; Gillian Hadfield, a law professor and economist at the University of Toronto, estimated in 2020 that “well over 80%” of Americans who need legal help can’t get it because of the cost.

That environment seems tailor-made for disruption via generative AI. But there have already been hallucinatory mishaps, where models produced output that looks real but isn’t. In perhaps the most highly publicized example, two New York lawyers were sanctioned last year after they submitted a brief — written by ChatGPT — that featured fake cases. 

In the face of this challenge, the effort, according to Robin AI CEO Richard Robinson, is to be more thoughtful in how the tech is applied to the legal sector. 

Robinson, himself a former lawyer, founded the company in 2019 specifically as a solution to the world of contract law. His intention was to create a human-in-the-loop system that would speed lawyers up (thereby reducing their cost) while also democratizing legal knowledge to the masses. 

“The idea was you’re Batman, and we’re Robin,” Robinson told me. 

The guardrails: Robinson said that an important focus involves clearly clarifying the limits of such models: They won’t provide personalized legal advice and they won’t get people out of jail. They will scan contracts. With these limits established, and in the more narrow arena of contract review, Robinson isn’t too concerned about hallucinations.  

“I still think it’s better than going on Google, or just not knowing,” he said. “I still think it’s better than having no help at all.”

‘First thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers’ (Shakespeare): Robinson expects that with AI, the bulk of legal work will eventually become enormously streamlined and accessible. He argued that lot of legal knowledge isn’t much more than “memorization,” something “humans have never actually been good at.”

The result of this would likely be fewer, but better, lawyers. 

“I don’t think the industry should be obsessed by how many lawyers there are,” Robinson said. “Its job is to serve society. I think the industry has had a really bad reputation for a long time, and I think these technologies give us a chance to chart a different course.” 

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-Ian Krietzberg, Editor-in-Chief, The Deep View