“I’ve talked to a lot of the main researchers in the field. The way I think about it is almost like LLM steps. And when you had GPT-3.5, and you went to 4, suddenly legal opened up as a vertical. I backed a company called Harvey, and they showed me side-by-side 2.5 versus 4, 3.5 doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work. You had a model update, suddenly you could do legal. What’s the next step? You have these steps, and so it’s this ladder that you’re climbing. And eventually, you’re going to get to a point where it can do all of human services. And I don’t know if that’s GPT-7 equivalent, or 8, or 6, or 10, or whatever, but we’re going to get there. So you really don’t think of it in terms of man-machine symbiosis stuff. Like stuff we’re building now to do these services and win. Will those companies still be valuable in five years, because they can replace it with AI as it goes along? Or is it going to be something new? It’s going to be OpenAI itself that just owns all of those things that I was talking about. You know, it’s interesting. When I diligence Harvey, I called a bunch of big law firms. And I asked them, how do you think about this? And law firms, traditionally, are some of the worst software buyers in the world, right? They don’t really innovate. They’re locked down because of security, and privacy, and other very legitimate reasons. But they tend to be very bad buyers. But they were adopting Harvey really quickly. And so I asked them, how do you view the future of AI? What do you think is going to happen? And I was surprised by how thoughtful and forward-thinking they were on this, where they said, look, we think the nature of a law firm will change. Because right now, we hire, I’m making it up, 50 associates every year. And five of them will make it to partner. But we now think that, in a couple of years, we can just hire five associates to begin with. But then who becomes our partners? What do they learn along the way? How do we teach them? How do we screen them? How do we have a portfolio of people so that some work out and some don’t? And so they’re thinking about the legacy of their law firms. And they’re like, we don’t know how to think about this future world. But it also means maybe you have one senior partner, and two associates, and 30 bots. And so the whole thing kind of shifts.”



– Elad Gil during his appearance on Joe Lonsdale’s podcast (Episode: Secrets of Investing Early).