Sol Irvine

東本願寺

@theallinpod Guys who never once moisturized after a shower, but they'll invest $200M in an enzyme cream.

Friedberg: New study shows enzyme reverses skin age from 70+ years to 31 Chamath: That’s a $2T market. Did Scientists Just Discover How to Reverse Skin Aging!? “CML is kind of the predominant molecule that gets formed in this extracellular matrix that's driving aging, and nothing breaks it down. So these scientists set out to try and create an enzyme, an enzyme is a protein that breaks something down, that can break down CML. And so these guys kind of went out and they took the target, which is CML, and tried to figure out, ‘Okay, how do we actually degrade CML, clear that extracellular matrix, and reverse aging?’ They started to test it on the proteins that we would find in our body, casein, collagen, retinal proteins, which are in your eye, hemoglobin, and they were able to get rid of 52 to 97% of the CML, just degrade it away. And then they found several sites where they were able to degrade over 90%. And then they took actual human skin from elderly patients that had donated their skin, and they put this enzyme onto that skin, and they were able to eliminate 55% of the CML on the skin, basically reverse the skin's age down to the age of a 31-year-old, this is from greater than 70-year-old patients, just by putting this enzyme on the skin. And so it's kind of a groundbreaking demonstration of combination of AlphaFold, what's called directed evolution, where you change the order of the DNA that changes the structure of the protein to test different proteins, do high throughput screening, and ultimately make a novel protein that doesn't exist in nature today that can do something pretty profound for human health.” Chamath: “It will be a trillion-dollar market. If you can create a cream…” Friedberg: “I mean, dude, if you could put this enzyme literally on your skin and have it absorb in…” Chamath: “Game over. That alone is $2 trillion.”

@sethtjf @gordon_cassie It implies that they were leaning on WL to report real cases. I rarely do legal research these days. Do litigators typically verify cases from WL in Lexis or another second source?

@solirvine @gordon_cassie What does that even mean? Do they just copy the search results from WL into their briefs???

Mounting body of court opinions calling out specific AI tools that caused hallucinations. Harvey and Westlaw already named. Of course they will all eventual be named because they are all wrappers on the same LLMs.

Typical Saturday night activities for me…

@gordon_cassie Duty of competence requires senior lawyer to review junior’s work. Full stop. AI, or not AI. If the junior made up cases without AI, it’s just as inexcusable.

I've been reading a lot of them and I think this is too simplistic. Many lawyers caught up in this have 30+ year careers. Many times they didn't know Gen AI was being used at all. GenAI is the first time a senior lawyer has had to watch for complete made up law in work from a junior practitioner. This did not need to be on any senior lawyers radar until two years ago and it's not like a memo went out about it. I think it's unfair to conclude a lawyer is incompetent after successfully practicing law for 3 decades because they got tripped up by a brand new technology that no one really understands properly.

@willchen500 Some MSO’s make lawyers owners of the ServiceCo, I think. That doesn’t help ServiceCo owners reach into FirmCo fees, though.

@willchen500 Can’t be rev share in most places due to prohibition against non-lawyer participants. It has to be arm’s length license/service fee, as far as I know.

Any founders of AI native firms want to chime in here?

@willchen500 I’m skeptical that MSO model’s incentives work for big VC returns. The only way it works is if lawyers are a commodity and the MSO is a scale play (law firm roll up), or if the MSO plans to participate in legal fees (despite ethics barrier). I try not to be a cynic, though.

@solirvine Could you share more on this

@willchen500 Bonus points for a VC-backed MSO that pretends not to share in upside from legal services.

@willchen500 "AI native law firm" means a firm with: (a) a vibe-coded admin layer, (b) clients that expect to pay less than BigLaw fees, and (c) no doomer lawyers dragging their feet.

SITUATION DETECTED: Noetra, a new Japanese government-backed venture, will buy 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to build a homegrown foundational AI model for robots, per Bloomberg. Allocated $2.4 billion in public funds, it will build a 140 MW data center going online in June 2028.

@shaydeofgold @janeinLA My lockstep base was higher in BigLaw in 2005.

@janeinLA That’s fair. Big law salaries have ballooned in ways no one anticipated lol

My problem is that I’m most concerned about her only making $300k after 15 years in big law

@willchen500 Very funny that AI edge in legal tech is eliminating the cost of Harvey.

@solirvine Yea the usual stuff no idea about offshoring but I think no

Just spoke to the founder of a well known AI native law firm. They have built their own version of Harvey that has more utility and bespoke integrations. They are using their tech to undercut their closest Biglaw competitors by 50% or more, and have landed a bunch of respectable marquee clients. So far Biglaw has been moving slow on the AI front. They are also developing an unhealthy reliance on third party vendors who are now selling to their own clients. Right now the margin compression is chiefly in EC/VC work but I’m sure in less than a year we will see AI native law firms move up the value chain to mid market M&A / PE work for example. Another trend we will likely also see are tech savvy big law partners taking their book of business and starting their own firms with better pricing but capturing a bigger piece of the traditional 30% cut of revenue they have been getting at Biglaw.

@willchen500 OK then I'm guessing low-TCV sourcing, NDAs, maybe due diligence reviews. Are they offshoring? (Sorry for all the questions)

@solirvine Fixed pricing

1. Anthropic's CoWork plugin ecosystem is a mess for devs and users. That's a big fumble, imo. OpenAI's is better. 2. Get ready for these plugin "marketplaces" to convert to annoying Apple-style app stores with payments and a 30% skim.

The major difference between Claude (incl Sonnet -> Fable) and the GPT family is that Claude *consistently* jumps to conclusions without researching readily-available web content like official docs. Claude loves to draw conclusions from one example.

@btaylor Me too. I was a heavy user of em-dash before AI. What's extra-annoying is that AI didn't even use them properly.

I deeply resent that AI has forced me to eliminate em dashes from my writing for fear of signaling slop

@thinkymachines has the best brand aesthetic in AI

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