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I'm going to bring this up just because its in the back of my mind and I'm going to reserve some small amount of probability for it.
But I can imagine the scenario where Sam himself arranges for these (pretty ineffective, obviously) attacks against his home as a counter to the bad press and to make sure he keeps his grasp on power, as he's already been ousted once.
Yes, it's implausible that he'd pull a Jussie Smollet, it is VASTLY more likely to be actual random violence. But I have enough distrust for Altman that I think he'd be willing to do something like this, especially if it carried minimal risk of personal harm.
Holy cow.
I guess the high achievers are technically the MOST likely to feel this anxiety, because they can directly perceive their competition is no longer just other high achievers... but this machine that can outperform them on every single metric that matters for success.
And as a former High School Valedictorian myself... I don't have a good answer here.
Its patently absurd to say he should toss out his academic achievement and instead divert into blue collar/physical work.
But to continue in academics would be a doomed play.
Uhhh get him in a gym and possibly doing some martial arts STAT, if only for the mental health benefits.
I think that would be a bad strategy for Altman, since I think that the majority of the population's reaction to hearing about the assassination attempts against Altman is either "who's that?" or "I wish they had managed to kill him". Even among the economic movers and shakers, I doubt that many people would actually be sad if Altman was killed.
Yeahhhh the amount of support for the attempts coming out should be a wake up call of some kind.
I'm not sure he's going to heed it in any way other than boosting his personal security presence.
"lamest cyberpunk dystopia ever" rings more and more true -- the head of the $1T worldleading AI company needs to have a team of ninjas armed with micron-edge katanas, or killer robots at least; Sam will just borrow some beefcakes from Thiel, or something.
Yeah. If Sam doesn't have a team of Blackwater mercs in exoskeletons guarding his house 24/7 then Silicon Valley is a joke.
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At this point he's considering law, because lawyers decide what's allowed or not in this country. His opinion is that it'll be one of the last safe fields left.
Law hasn't been a great field for a while either. Source: I'm a law school dropout.
Around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, tons of universities added law schools. They basically bring in the same amount of revenue as medical schools, but with waaaaay less overhead. The legal job market got flooded in the mid 10's. I'm sure supply and demand have normalized a bit since then, but law isn't nearly as surefire a way to be wealthy as it used too be.
i.e. a genius.
Yes and no. Hiring is up, but I think there's significant turnover too. Some law firms realized that when you have a surplus of desperate new grads, you can churn your associates harder and replace them easier.
Right now the churn is more in recent grads leaving for what they perceive to be greener pastures. The problem right now isn't so much a shortage of lawyers as it is a shortage of experienced lawyers. I work at a smaller firm, and just a couple months ago a younger guy who clerked for a judge after law school and whose wife works across the street from us quit to take a different job. I don't even know if the pay is any better, but it seems like everyone under the age of 35, and several people who are older, think that whatever job they're doing is unsatisfying and wants to do something closer to what they imagined the practice of law would look like. In the meantime, we can't find anyone to replace these people. Hiring out of law school only makes the situation worse because it takes several months to get an attorney to the point where they're actually making money for the firm, and they're unwilling to do that for a guy who is going to bolt in six months.
How is AI upending the profession in your case? Are there interesting avenues undergrads can pursue that have an opportunity to reinvigorate the profession in some sense? Or is it all fairly mundane?
I'm an atypical case, since I work at a non-profit and I spend a lot of time researching case law (I'm told by a lot of private practice friends that they haven't typed a casr citation into westlaw or lexis in years), but Westlaw's built-in AI has largely replaced summer associates as my go to source of info for "hmm, I wonder" type questions. Simple queries where I just want a quick sniff test to see if the theory I'm spitballing is precluded by some obvious bit of black letter law, or a short summary of how a particular jurisdiction handles some procedural issue. I get an answer of questionable veracity I'll need to verify and develop before getting any value out of, but the AI gives it to me in 45 seconds rather than 3-4 days. So I have to make a conscious effort to inefficiently include interns and new attorneys in things for training purposes, because it probably takes about a year before a new lawyer outperforms the AI (at current AI capabilities). We're not hiring fewer of them yet, since the higher-ups are mindful of maintaining the talent pipeline and don't want to be scrambling to find mid-levels in five years, but they do have less to do.
I'm adamant about never using AI for drafting assistance, but I notice my colleagues increasingly using it to generate first drafts of things like emails and op-eds. Haven't seen any open use of it on actual legal documents yet.
As far as labor force impact, I think it's very practice-area-dependent. The more your practice involves spreadsheets and insurance paperwork, volume-dependent mad libs-type work, the more impact you'll feel. If you're heavily reliant on tech companies or other clients making "AI first" pushes, it's probably pretty rough. I worry for our legal secretaries. Litigators are pretty safe. As long as judges require flesh and blood people standing in court rooms (or at least on zoom) and continue to ban the unauthorized practice of law, there's only so much automation that can really take place. Doctors and lawyers have spent over a century erecting walls and moats to protect their professions from competition from the dirty proles; we're not submitting to the robots without a fight.
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I haven't used AI for work and I don't know of anyone who does. I honestly don't know what I would even use it for. I guess I could theoretically load deposition transcripts in case I needed to see if there was one taken in the past where a witness said something I could use, but that would literally require millions of tokens of input context, assuming it was even capable of handling such a request, and the utility of that would be limited, i.e. I'd do it if it were cheap enough but there's no way it would be cheap enough. People bring up research a lot and it might be useful there, but I do research like twice a year.
Not saying it would or wouldn't work well for this, but even Opus 4.6 is $5 per million input tokens. You probably wouldn't want to feed in all the transcripts at once though.
Well, that's the problem, since it's only worth doing if I can feed in all the transcripts at once. If I knew which transcripts I needed, I wouldn't need an LLM to tell me! We're talking literally tens of thousands of transcripts here, most of them well over 100 pages. If I have to curate them to fit inside a reasonable context window, then I've already done 99% of the work, since it only takes a few minutes for me to look in the index and see if there's any relevant testimony. Even by my conservative calculations, at $5/token it would be prohibitively expensive to do anything, even if a large enough context window existed, and with that much context the LLM's accuracy would start to break down pretty quickly.
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I agree with this overall, and I don't even know where new grads are necessarily going. I know of urban DA/PD offices that have trouble hiring, and the pay/benefits are decent. Doing a few years at either to get some trial/motion/evidentiary hearing experience before moving on is apparently something new grads are not willing to do. The PD offices I'm most familiar with seem to be trading their experienced attorneys every few years but there really aren't that many new faces coming up the ranks.
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Okay.
As a lawyer, I am going to say no, don't do that.
His logic is not unsound, since we do in fact have control over how our profession is practiced and can use our guild authority to keep AI sidelined (for now). Here's a take I had three years ago that I still stand by. I've reiterated it. (holy crap GPT-3 was almost 6 years ago?)
Yes we can throw up barriers to AI adoption, and make the laws that protect us from AI competition. That's not as strong a moat as it seems. Even if lawyers are protected from AI competition... guess what your clients are doing.
And:
A) A bunch of other people are going to get a similar idea, so it'll be saturated, most likely. Already happening to an extent.
B) Most lawyers are miserable in their area of law. I am not, but I still had a long period of suck to get through, kept alive by my long-term goal of getting where I am now.
C) He will probably not become fabulously wealthy in this field even if AI doesn't supplant most entry-level legal jobs. MAKE HIM AWARE OF THE BIMODAL SALARY DISTRIBUTION FOR NEW GRADS. This was my big mistake early on.
There is now some evidence of downward pressure on new grad salaries.
I truly wish I had a more positive prescription to give out, but I am vehement about this negative one.
I think this sort of thing is really difficult to predict. It seems pretty clear that there will be some minimum demand for attorneys in the future:
By law, corporations must be represented by licensed attorneys;
It seems likely that a human being will be needed to make arguments to a jury;
Consulting with an attorney, who then queries an LLM, gives you a stronger argument that the communication is privileged than if you just query the LLM directly.
On the other hand, it seems plausible that the number of lawyers required will drop by quite a lot. If 50% of legal work can be done by LLMs, then a lot of lawyers will still have jobs, but many (including a lot of new grads) will end up unemployed.
But will it really work like that? There has been an explosion in litigation over the last 40 years, in part because technology made it more economically feasible to pursue disputes. One of the dirty little secrets of the US Court system is that a lot of the time judges throw out meritorious cases because they believe the system is just too busy to be bothered. A lot of wrongs never get litigated simply because there just aren't enough lawyers and judges to handle them.
So it's entirely possible that with AI, there will be more demand for lawyers than ever.
I just don't see anyway to sustain the pipeline if fresh Associates CANNOT outperform the LLMs, especially on price.
If a law firm can spin up an arbitrary amount of 'agents' that have all the requisite knowledge to handle a given legal issue, maybe they hire some attorneys to wrangle the agents and sign off on their output.
But that doesn't give those attorneys good legal experience they can translate into advancing their career. That's a step above doc review.
Hell, AI should be able to replace most Law School professors. It SHOULD become possible to become a competent lawyer without setting foot in a law school campus.
So naively, what I see coming down the pike is a massive spike in the 'supply' of legal knowledge that is on tap... and no clear reason why people should prefer the person who got a 6-figure loan for law school (and has to bill accordingly) over the $20-$200/month uberexpert that lives in their pocket. So from whence comes demand for human lawyer?
Basically one thing: Accountability. They can be punished for screwups.
One possible outcome is that governments spend money beefing up their legal systems, staffing out enough judges and clerks and such to actually meet the surge.
But courts are a pure cost center, so I just doubt it happens. Instead I think more disputes go to private arbitration, or maybe AI Mediators become a popular option. I think the demand for NONJUDICIAL resolutions surges! They're cheaper and possibly even more accurate. And if mediation and arbitration becomes popular... guess what all those rules about attorneys being needed to argue for a jury or represent a corpo get sidestepped very neatly.
You’ll still need clerical workers to supervise the LLM’s or something analogous to that. I’ll never be sold on the great transformative possibilities of them due to the mathematical impossibility of resolving the hallucination problem. How are you going to trust that it correctly read that Congressional omnibus bill?
How do you trust a human assistant did so?
You verify.
So then what problems is the LLM solving in that case? The advantage doesn’t seem to be all that great.
Its doing the same work but faster, cheaper, and probably more thoroughly, and can be scaled up arbitrarily.
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I agree that the BIGLAW model, as it exists today (e.g. new litigation associates spend 2 or 3 years in the library) is very unlikely to survive mature LLMs. But possibly there will be a spike in demand for warm bodies to be in the courtroom.
Well the way it happens is that the legislature passes some new law which gives people a cause of action for some wrong. Or the courts expand the concept of due process. More lawsuits or proceedings get filed. The courts get more of a backlog. So more judges need to get hired and more courthouses built. And in fact, there are far more judges now than there were in the past.
Here's an example: It used to be that if you were denied some government benefit, such as welfare or social security or unemployment insurance, you were out of luck. But nowadays, you have a right to a speedy hearing before an administrative law judge. Making more work for attorneys. Possibly in the future this process will continue.
Right, but I don't see the incentive for governments to expand the existing systems, which are already getting seriously backlogged (at least around here).
The trend over the years has been to expand and expand and expand -- despite the fact that it costs the government money.
I mean, expanding areas where they are capable of grifting and grafting.
The courts aren't particularly suitable for that.
The courts are more just targets for ideological subversion.
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I've personally suggested he join the military. That idea did not go over well with the family.
Suggest he become a JAG, best of both worlds and his chances of getting KIA are near zero. And I think they'll pay off his law school student loans if he stays with it for a decade or something like that.
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That is a belittling suggestion. Similar to the discourse on X among right wingers where one camp says bright young men should get into trades. Much has been said on why this is belittling and dis-empowering for bright young men.
You can easily do your four years in the service, make up your mind as to what to use the free college for, and then take advantage of preferential hiring.
There's also nothing wrong with the trades; we stand to benefit strongly from AI, after all. Not everyone is going to be a CEO or have a cushy sinecure, and that's OK.
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Being an officer isn't too bad.
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Going in as an officer is great for aspiring right-wing leaders. If you commit to it and don't screw up, you build a resume and a rolodex and give yourself future credibility as a political leader. It only negatively impacts your status among a small sliver of the population and opens up future employment avenues as well.
If a son of mine was interested in the military, I would likely discourage them from going in as enlisted, but not necessarily if they were interested in going in as an officer.
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It's not a belittling suggestion. My family has a long history of military service. The only reason I didn't join was because I was in a car accident that rendered me medically unfit my senior year of high school.
Being an officer isn't a bad gig, if you can get it.
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That's a hard sell at this particular moment, for sure.
Might be worth a shot to see if he can get in the military industrial complex, maybe Palmer Luckey would hire him.
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Co-signed 100%. At this point, law is only worth going into if someone else is paying for it and the person has worked in some kind of law office and finds they enjoy the work.
I had a young guy in my office last month, with his dad (the client), who was apparently been accepted to Georgetown Law and was pretty hyped to be going.
I couldn't bring myself to tell him how badly I expected that to turn out for him in the end.
Important detail: he's black, so my guess is that he's getting some financial support.
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It's funny. I love the idea of law. I briefly worked in the mail room of a law firm and even enjoyed that.
I took the LSAT and got a 178.
Then 2008 happened and every single liberal arts student in the country stampeded into law. I guess it wasn't meant to be.
Maybe I'll sit for the patent agent test one day.
I hit the job market in early 2008. Consider yourself beyond fortunate at the bullet you dodged.
I imagine you would pass (the low pass rate comes from engineers with no legal training taking it, not lots of lawyers with 178 LSATs taking it; I studied seriously for it like it was a true bar exam and was way overprepared), but unless it would increase your income in some way, it's probably not worth the time and effort.
Oh I'm not a lawyer. I bailed and stayed in software before I racked up a shitload of debt.
I'm one of those engineers.
Yes, I should've said "not lots of [actual or potential] lawyers with 178 LSATs" or something like that.
No, you're an engineer who took the LSAT and did very well. Again, not the kind of engineer dragging down the pass rate.
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