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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
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.
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.
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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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