As LLM’s become exponentially better it is clear that vertical AI agents are key to the next generation of billion dollar SaaS companies. In this episode of the Lightcone, the hosts sit down with YC alum Jake Heller, the co-founder and CEO of Casetext (which sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million in cash in 2023) to discuss what it takes to build a successful vertical AI company and overcome resistance from industry veterans and skeptics.
Chapters (Powered by https://bit.ly/chapterme-yc) - 00:00 Coming Up 01:40 Building a successful vertical AI company 06:05 The unique challenges of law and AI 09:24 The turning point for lawyers with ChatGPT 11:25 Finding product market fit in legal 15:04 Entering deep founder mode 20:40 Approaching prompt engineering step by step 25:05 Going beyond GPT wrappers 28:10 Aiming for 100% accuracy 30:48 Thoughts on o1’s capabilities
This is our first ever experience talking to this God-like feeling, you know, AI that
was all of a sudden doing these tasks that would take me when I practiced like a whole
day and it's being done in a minute and a half.
The whole company, all 120 of us did not sleep for those months before GPT-4.
We felt like we had this amazing opportunity to run far ahead of the market.
That's why you're the first man on the moon.
Welcome back to another episode of The Light Cone.
I'm Gary.
This is Jared and Diana.
Harj is out, but he'll be back on the next one.
And today, we have a very special guest, Jake Heller of Case Text.
I think of Jake as a little bit like one of the first people on the surface of the moon.
He created Case Text more than, I think, 11, 12 years ago, actually.
And in the first 10 years, you went from zero to $100 million valuation.
And then in a matter of two months after the release of GPT-4, that valuation went to a
liquid exit to Thomson Reuters for $650 million.
So, you have a lot of lessons about how to create real value from really large language
models.
I think you were, of our friends in YC, one of the first people to actually realize this
is a sea change and revolution.
And not only that, we're going to bet the company on it.
And you were super right.
So, welcome, Jake.
Happy to be here.
One of the cool things, I think, about Jake's story and the reason why we want to bring
him on today is that if you just look at the companies that good founders are starting
now, it's a lot of vertical AI agents.
I mean, I was trying to count the ones in S24.
We have literally dozens of the YC companies in the last batch for building vertical-specific
AI agents.
And I think Jake is the founder who is currently running the most successful vertical AI agent.
It's by far the largest acquisition, and it's actually deployed at scale in a lot of mission
critical situations.
And the inspiration for this was we hosted this retreat a few months ago, and Jake gave
an incredible talk about how he built it.
And we thought that it'd be super useful for people who watch The Light Cone, who are
interested in this area, to hear directly from one of the most successful builders in
this area, how he did it.
So how did you do it?
Well, first of all, like a lot of these things, there's a certain amount of luck.
Over the course of our decade-long journey, we started investing very deeply in AI and
natural language processing.
And we became close with a number of different research labs, including some of the folks
at OpenAI.
And when it came time for them to start testing early versions, we didn't realize it was
GPT-4 at the time, but what was GPT-4, we got a very early view of it.
And so months before the public release of GPT-4, we as a company were all under NDA,
all working on this thing.
And I'll never forget the first time I saw it, it took maybe 48 hours for us to decide
to take every single person at the company and shift what they were working on from the
projects we were then working on at the time to 100% of the company all working on building
this new product we call CoCouncil based on the GPT-4 technology.
How many people was that?
We're about 120 people at the time.
So you took like 120 people and completely changed what they were all working on?
Yes, yes, yes.
In 48 hours?
Yes.
And for the people watching, case techs originally, I mean, had always been in the legal space.
You're a lawyer and you built something for yourself.
And sort of the first versions of it were actually sort of annotated versions of case
law, actually.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So in the very early origins of the company, the mission of the company, what we're always
focused on is how can we build something that brings the best of technology to the legal
space?
As a lawyer, I actually like the job a lot.
The parts of my job that I hated the most was when I had to interact with the technology
that lawyers have to use regularly to get the job done.
I remember thinking, and this is like 2012, when I was at a law firm, if I wanted to do
something really trivial, I had like a new iPhone at the time, I can go on Google and
find like movie times or where's the closest open Thai restaurant with vegetarian options.
That was super easy.
But if I wanted to find the piece of evidence that was going to exonerate my client and
make it so he doesn't have to go to jail for the rest of his life, or the key legal
case that'll help me win a billion dollar lawsuit, well, that's going to be like five
days in a row until 5 a.m. every day.
I was like, there's got to be a better way.
What is the process as a lawyer?
You would have to read the stacks and stacks of documents?
Pretty much, yeah.
Right before I started practicing, before everything went online, you would literally
be in a basement with banker's boxes full of documents, reading them one by one by one
to try to find all the emails in a company like Pfizer or Google to see if there was
potential fraud.
And then if you wanted to find case law, slightly before my time, you'd literally go to the
library and open up books and just start reading.
And new products were coming out that were some of the first web-based research tools,
but they were pretty clunky.
It was just hard to find the relevant information.
You couldn't do Ctrl-F for any of this stuff, basically.
Basically not, yeah.
And what was interesting about your background is you also happen to be the rare breed of
having also computer science training.
So this must have driven you nuts.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, in the law firm, I'll never forget, I was building browser plugins to go on top
of the tools I was using just to make my life more efficient and effective.
And actually, one of the reasons I left the law firm to start a company and apply to YC
was I got in trouble with the general counsel, who thought, like, hey, why are you spending
all your time doing this tech stuff?
And also made at the time very clear that my law firm owns all that technology.
So I decided to do something different.
So do you want to tell us a little bit about the first 10 years of case techs,
the sort of long slog in the pre-LLM era?
One of the lessons here, I think, that I took away from that time period is that when you
start a company, you may not get the exact right, you may have the right kind of general
direction.
You know there's a problem, you're trying to solve it.
But it could take a very long time to figure out what the solution is.
For us, for example, we saw that there was this kind of combined issue of bad technology
in the legal sphere, but also a lot of lawyers use content to do things like research and
understand what the law is.
And so we thought, OK, well, we can do the technology better, but how are we going to
get this content?
And we spent like a couple of years trying to get, as Gary said, lawyers to annotate
case law and to provide information.
So it's like a UGC site, like a user-generated content site.
Yeah, that was a big focus of ours, like the kind of one-two punch of better technology,
but also better content.
At the time, our heroes were like Stack Overflow and Wikipedia and GitHub and other kind of
open source or UGC kind of websites.
And it was a total failure.
We could not get lawyers to contribute their time and information.
And I think these are just different populations.
The typical Wikipedia editor has more time on their hands than they know what to do with.
And so they're adding, not all, but many do.
And they're adding content for free.
And altruistically, lawyers bill by the hour.
Their time is incredibly valuable.
They're always running out of time.
They had no time to kind of contribute to some UGC site.
So we had to pivot.
And we started investing very deeply.
At the time, it was not called AI.
It was just like natural language processing and machine learning.
And we saw that, first of all, we didn't need to create all this UGC to replicate some of
the best benefits of what our competitors had in these big content databases.
Some of it you can basically do even then on a kind of automated basis.
And then also, we were starting to create these user experiences that were a lot better than
our competitors could offer.
Then at the time, it seems kind of quaint like AI stuff, like the same recommendation algorithm
that powers Pandora and Spotify's recommended music.
They look at basically how this song relates to that song.
People listen to this, also listen to this, and this, and this.
Similarly, we looked at cases that cite to other cases.
They all reference earlier opinions.
They kind of build out this network of citations.
And we found ways that we can check a lawyer's work.
They'd upload their work so far and be like, well, everybody who talks about this case
talks about this case too.
And you missed that.
So cool experiences like that.
But the truth is, until the very end, until CoCounsel, a lot of what we did were, relatively
speaking, kind of incremental improvements on the legal workflow.
And one of the things that's kind of weird about this is when there's just an incremental
improvement, it's actually pretty easy to ignore.
A lot of our clients, they would never say this literally, but you get this impression
when you walk into their room, their office, and you try to pitch them a product.
And you say, this is going to change everything about the way you practice.
And they go, well, I make $5 million a year.
I don't want nothing to change.
This technology, I do not want to introduce anything that has the opportunity to make
my life at all worse, or potentially worse, or potentially more efficient because they
build by the hour.
It was really only after much later when ChatGPT came out.
At the time we were privately and secretly working on GPT-4, ChatGPT came out, and all
of a sudden, every lawyer in America, probably in the world, saw, oh my God, I don't know
exactly how this is going to change my work, but it's going to change it very substantially.
Like, they could feel it.
And the same guys and gals were telling us, I make $5 million a year.
Why would it change anything about my life?
I make $5 million a year.
This is going to change something.
I need to be ahead of this.
The technology itself, and we'll get into that in a second, really changed what we can
build for lawyers.
But also the market perceptions of what was necessary really changed as well.
And for the first time in our 10 years, even before we launched CoCounsel publicly based
on GPT-4, they were calling us.
We know you work on AI.
We need to get on top of this.
What can you show us?
What can we work on?
And I think it's because the change was not incremental anymore.
It was fundamental.
And all of a sudden, they had to pay attention.
They could not ignore it.
I guess the mental model I have for you is, there's this concept of the idea maze.
The founder goes in the beginning of the maze, and they're just feeling around, actually
in the arena, talking to customers, learning where are the walls, which path to go.
Should I go left or right?
And then as is actually common for startup founders in the idea maze, you will actually
reach a dead end.
And then usually you have to pivot.
And then I think you have a very interesting story because you were sort of towards the
end of maybe one of the parts that weren't going to get you all the way to product market
fit.
But then LLMs drop, and then it's like the maze got shaken up.
And then you were actually much closer to product market fit than absolutely anyone
else.
And so that's why.
What a crazy time.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
That's why you're the first man on the moon.
Yeah, I think there's really something to that.
And the thing is, each time we progressed through that maze, it felt like maybe now
we're at product market fit.
We were making real revenue before we launched CoCouncil, and we had real customers, and
they said really great things about us.
I keep on thinking about this article written by Marc Andreessen in the early 2000s.
I think it's called The Only Thing That Matters.
And in it, he describes what it feels like to have product market fit.
He lists things like your servers will go down.
You can't hire support people and salespeople fast enough.
You're going to eat for a year free at Buck's, the famous Woodside diner where a lot of VCs
will take you.
I read that early on in my career, and I was like, okay, well, that's hyperbolic.
But when we launched CoCouncil, it was literally exactly that.
Our servers were going down.
We could not hire support people fast enough.
We couldn't hire salespeople fast enough.
I ate a lot of bucks.
Before, it was a really big day if we were in the ABA journal or some other legal-specific
publication.
We were on CNN and MSNBC.
All of a sudden, everything changed.
And that's what real product market fit looks like.
I think Marc was, even in 2005 or whenever the article came out, exactly right about
what it looked like in 2023.
Can you talk about that crazy time?
Because it was only two months from when you launched CoCouncil to getting bought for $650
million.
So what happened in those two months?
Well, to be clear, the transaction only closed six months after we launched, but it was two
months since the conversation started.
And so we started building CoCouncil.
And just to kind of background purposes, the idea we came up with, again, like 48 hours,
like a weekend after seeing GPT-4.
It's something that's not going to sound crazy today, but it felt crazy at the time,
which is this AI legal assistant, by which we mean it's almost like a new member of the
firm.
You can just talk to it, not unlike how you might talk to something like ChatGPT today,
and give it tasks like, I need you to read these million documents for me and tell me
if there's any evidence of fraud happening in this company.
And then within a couple of hours, it's like, I've read all the documents.
Here's what the summary is.
Or summarize documents or do legal research and put together a whole memo after researching
hundreds or thousands of cases, answering the lawyer's initial research question.
And so in that sense, it was this like really powerful extension of the workforce of these
law firms.
That was the concept from the beginning.
And we made a very early initial version of it.
And we started because we couldn't, under our agreement with OpenAI, we could not be
public about this product, but they did let us extend the NDA to a handful of our customers.
And so we started having our customers use it.
And so for months before GPT-4 was launched publicly, we had a number of law firms.
They had no idea they were using GPT-4, but they were seeing something really special.
This is actually even before ChatGPT.
So this is their first ever experience talking to this godlike feeling AI that was all of
a sudden doing these tasks that would take me when I practiced a whole day, and it's
being done in a minute and a half.
And so as you might imagine, it was nuts.
First of all, the whole company, all 120 of us did not sleep for those months before GPT-4
was publicly launched, and therefore we could publicly launch the product.
We felt like we had this amazing opportunity to run far ahead of the market.
Something really beautiful happens when everybody's working super, super hard, which is you iterate
so quickly past.
Actually, I still see some companies out there, they're stuck where we were in the first
month of seeing GPT-4.
And I think it's because they're just not as intensely focused and engaged as we were.
About six months or so before the public launch of GPT-4.
You kind of, to do this transition, you had to shake the company.
You kind of went into deep founder mode because there's a lot of pushback from employees.
It's like, oh, this thing was working.
Why should we throw ourselves into the deep end of AI?
Tell us about that founder mode moment for you.
And so first of all, this is especially true if you're running a business for 10 years,
because they've seen you wander through that maze and bump into dead ends.
And a lot of those folks have been there for most or all that time, watching me as the
founder saying, we're definitely going this direction.
It's definitely going to work.
And sometimes it doesn't.
And you only get so many of those with employees, right?
So this was maybe my last one that I had with some of these folks.
And they're like, here Jake goes again with his crazy new technology and some idea we're
going to invest deeply in.
And yeah, it took a job to convince people.
And if you imagine what some of the different roles are, if you're in the go-to-market
role, if you're selling or marketing a product, and we're growing 70, 80% year over year.
We're between $15 and $20 million in ARR.
Things weren't terrible, right?
That's great.
Yeah, we're great.
But so they were like, why are we blowing the board?
Some of the members were like, I get this immediately.
Some of them had to be persuaded, right?
And about the founder mode moment, one thing that really worked for me is I led the way
through example.
I built the first version of it myself.
Wow.
Even with a 120-person company with a whole bunch of engineers and lawyers and stuff.
Before that, you opened up your IDE and actually built the thing yourself.
Oh, yeah.
And part of it was the NDA only extended at first to me and my co-founder.
That was it.
That was a blessing then, actually.
Yeah, exactly.
It turned out to be perfect.
And even after the NDA got extended a little bit, we kept it pretty small at first for
the first little bit of time.
I made my mind within 48 hours, the whole company's going to do this.
But we actually only told the company, I think, a week and a half after we first got access.
And during that week and a half, we built the very first prototype version of this.
And again, I'll never forget this.
The timing was just so funny.
We saw it on a Friday.
We had it all weekend long.
We're working with it.
And then Monday was an executive offsite where everybody came, all my executives came, and
they expected that we're going to be talking about how we're going to hit our sales target
for the next quarter.
And it's like, guys, we're talking about none of that.
We are talking about something totally different right now.
Let me show you something on my laptop.
So yeah, I built the first version myself.
But going through that process, me and then a handful of other people, I think was really
helpful.
And we also brought in customers early.
And that helped convince a lot of people.
As soon as a skeptical sales or marketing or whatever person or even engineer was on
at the end of a Zoom call where a customer was reacting to the product in real time and
giving us their honest reactions and seeing the look on their face.
And again, you have to imagine, it's almost hard to imagine that the world was like pre-chat
GPT.
But some of these people were seeing that exact idea for the first time.
And they were just blown away.
And that really changed minds quickly.
I mean, we saw people go through existential crises live on Zoom calls.
Like, oh my god.
You could see their expression change.
Exactly.
In all kinds of ways.
It's like, what am I going to do?
A lot of the very common reaction amongst the senior attorneys we showed it to was like,
well, they've got to retire soon.
Like, you know, I'd have to deal with this.
And some of this was really driven by GPT-4 coming out.
Like, you had access to three.
You had access even to two, I think.
Yeah, we had access.
We were in a close relationship with a lot of the labs, but including OpenAI.
And they kept on showing us stuff kind of early on in its development.
And they're like, well, can you build something with this for legal?
And every time we're like, no, this sucks.
Like, you know, by the time we got to three and 3.5, it was like, okay, well,
this is plausible-sounding English.
And it sounds kind of like a lawyer, so kudos to that.
But it is just making stuff up wildly.
It's very hard to connect it to a real use case.
Especially in legal, where it's so important that you actually get the facts right.
You can't hallucinate.
You can't even make the wrong kinds of assumptions.
And we had to do a lot of work with those earlier models to even get them close to usable.
And they just weren't really...
I mean, one totem or one example along the way is when GPT-3.5 came out, the study was run.
And it showed that GPT-3.5 got a 10th percentile on the bar passage, right?
So it did better than some people, actually.
But the 10% of them, yeah.
And probably the ones were just filling it out randomly, basically.
When we got early access to GPT-4, we're like, well, let's run the study again, too.
And we worked with OpenAI.
We're like, we're going to confirm that this test is not in the training set.
And it wasn't.
Totally attest to it.
And the test we ran, it did better than 90% of the test takers, right?
So this is a big difference.
And also, we started running some tests.
Like, okay, here's four or five cases to read.
Using those cases, write a memo responding to this question.
And we did a lot of prompt work to get it to essentially just do it accurately.
To cite the actual things in context that we gave it and not make things up.
And we're like, okay, well, this is very different than we saw before.
So it was a big moment for us.
And honestly, I'm not sure what the mindset was of the researchers we were working with,
but it almost felt like, by the time we were having that meeting, it felt like one of those
other meetings we'd had in the past where we were getting ready to say, like, this is not
going to work for legal.
I'll keep on trying.
And I think they saw us go through maybe some form of the existential crisis on that call
that our customers did.
They were like, oh, wait, this is super, super, super different.
I guess today we have O1, we have chain of thoughts, reasoning.
I think a lot of people look at it as it's not merely the text itself, but also the instructions
that lead up to the workflow.
But way at the beginning, nobody knew any of this stuff.
How did you start?
You had your sort of tests that you had written for previous versions of the model.
They outperformed.
But then there's this moment where you say, okay, well, now it's something, but what do
we do next?
And how do we do it?
So the process that we started with then, and it's actually not too dissimilar to what
we're doing today, it started with a question of like, okay, well, what problem are we trying
to solve for the user?
The user wants to do research, legal research, and they want a memo answering their question
with citations to the original source.
So that's the end result.
And then we're like, okay, well, how do we go from that end result, like working backwards
almost, what would it take to get there?
And what ends up happening a lot with the things that we built for co-counsel, we call
them skills, which felt very unique at the time.
I think a lot of companies now call their AI capability skills.
So when you're building these skills, it turns out it usually takes a lot of work to go from
like, say the customer inputs something, say like a set of documents or a question or what
have you, to the end result that they're looking for.
And the way that we thought about it was, how would the best attorney in the world approach
this problem?
And so in the case of research, for example, the best attorney would get the request, say
from a partner, and then break that request down into like actual search queries that
run against these platforms.
And sometimes they use special search syntax.
It looks actually pretty like SQL almost, right?
So like from the English language query, you have to break it down to these different kinds
of search queries, maybe a dozen different search queries.
You're being really diligent.
And then they'd execute the search queries against these databases of law.
And they come back with, say like 100 results each.
And then the most diligent best attorney would sit down and just read every single one of
these results that come back, all the case law, statutes, regulations.
And you'd start to do things like make notes and summarize and kind of compile like an
outline of what your response might be.
Like line by line or paragraph by paragraph, actually.
Yeah, 100%.
And you start just taking out those insights you're getting from what you're reading.
And then finally, based on all of that work and all the citations you've gathered, etc.,
then finally you put together your research memo.
And so we're like, okay, well, each one of those steps along the way, for the vast majority
of them, those were impossible to accomplish with previous technology.
But now they're prompts.
Think step-by-step.
Yeah, think step-by-step.
Yeah, exactly.
But we actually broke it down.
So getting to the final result might be a dozen or two dozen different individual prompts,
each of which might, by the way, be thinking step-by-step themselves.
And then for each of those prompts, as part of this chain of actions you take to get to
the final result, we had a very clear sense of what good looks like.
And we had a series, like a battery of tests before, but this got way more intense, where
we'd write at first maybe a few dozen tests, and then a few hundred, and then a few thousand
for every single one of those prompts.
So if the job to be done in the very beginning of this research process, for example, is
taking the English language query and breaking it down into search queries, we had a very
clear sense of what good search queries look like and wrote gold standard answers for,
given this input, this is what the output looks like, right?
And so our prompt engineers, and I was one of them at the very beginning, we all just
kind of in it together, were writing these English language prompts to try to write the
test first, basically, and wrote these English language prompts to try to get it so of 1,200
times, they got the right answer 1,199 times, or what have you.
So sort of like test-driven development.
Oh yeah.
Really approach from doing software engineering to prompt.
That's exactly right.
And the funny thing is, I never really believed in test-driven development before prompting.
I was like, oh, the code works, it doesn't, it's fine, you'll see it when you...
But with prompting, actually, I think it becomes even more important because of the nature
of these LLMs, that they might go in crazy directions unexpectedly.
And so you might very easily add in a set of instructions to solve one problem you're
seeing with these sets of tests, and then to break something with these sets of tests.
And so that exact kind of theory of test-driven development applies 10x more, I'd say, in
the world of prompting.
There's a lot of sort of the naysayers saying that a lot of companies are just building
GPD wrappers, and there's not a lot of IP getting built.
But actually, there's a lot of finesse to how you explain all of this.
Like, can you tell us about all of that, and how much more there's to be built?
Oh yeah.
I mean, I think the thing is, when you're actually trying to solve a problem for a customer,
and actually doing the job, and in our case, of what a young associate might do, and do
it really well, there are many layers of things you have to add in to actually get the job
done.
And by the time you add that all up, you're not like a GPT wrapper, you're a full application
that may include, in our case, proprietary data sets, like the law itself, and our annotations
to the law that we added automatically.
It may include connections into customer databases, in our case, in legal.
They have these very specific legal, specific document management systems.
So connecting into those is very important.
It may include something as subtle as how well you OCR, and what OCR programs you use,
and how you set those up.
When you're doing that task of, you know, one of the tasks that the co-counsel does,
for example, is reviewing large sets of documents.
Once you start working a lot of documents, you see something like handwriting all over
it, and they're tilted in the scan, and there's this crazy thing that they do in law where
they print four pages on one page to save room, and all OCR is going to read it directly
across, but actually it goes, you know, one, two, three, four.
And so by the time you've dealt with all of the edge cases, frankly, not even before you
hit the large language model, everything else up to the large language model,
there may be dozens of things you've built into your application to actually make it
work and work well.
And then you get to the prompting piece, and writing out tests and very specific prompts,
and the strategy for how you break down, you know, a big problem into step-by-step-by-step
kind of thinking, and how you feed in the information, how you format that information
the right way.
All of that also becomes, like, you know, your IP, and it's very hard to replicate,
very hard to build, and therefore very hard to replicate.
Which is all the business logic, which is all, even all the very successful SaaS companies
with a very specific domain, you need very, very custom, esoteric niche integrations,
like, plug into this esoteric law database.
Yeah, absolutely.
Two things that I think about all the time, it's like, basically all SaaS for a while
was just like a SQL wrapper, right?
Like, if you think about, like, very successful companies like Salesforce, they've built that
business logic around basically just databases, and connections between, like, tables and
a database.
And sometimes bridging that gap between something that, like, either a very technical person
can do, but most people can't, and making it accessible, or bridging that gap between
that almost works.
Like, you can do a lot of cool demos in chat GPT without building a line of code, but that
almost works, and works, you know, 70% of the time.
But going to 100% of the time is a very different kind of task, and people pay $20 a month for
the 70%, and maybe $500 or $1,000 a month isn't actually works, depending on the use
case, right?
So there's a lot of value gained going that last mile, or 100 miles, whatever it is.
Yeah, can you talk about how you went from 70% to 100%?
Because I think the other knock on this technology that we hear a lot is like, oh, these LLMs
hallucinate too much, they're not accurate enough for real world use.
But as you said earlier, like, the use case that you're working on is a mission critical
use case.
There's like, a lot at stake if the agent gives bad information to lawyers who are working
on important court cases.
How did you make it accurate enough for lawyers who are conservative by nature to trust it?
This test-driven development framework, first of all, goes a long way.
Because you can start seeing, you know, patterns and why it's making a mistake, and then you
add instructions against that pattern.
And then sometimes it still doesn't, you know, do the right thing.
And then you kind of really ask yourself, okay, well, was I being super clear in my
instructions?
Am I including information it shouldn't see or too little information for it to really
get the full context?
And usually, like, these things are pretty intelligent.
And so usually you can kind of root cause why you're failing certain tests, and then
build to a place where you're actually passing those tests and just getting it right.
You know, and one of the things we learned is if it after passes, frankly, even like
100 tests, the odd that it will do on any random distribution of like user inputs,
the next 100,000, 100% accurately is like very high.
One of the things that strikes me that is tricky, like many founders we work with are
very tempted to just raw dog it.
Yeah.
It's like, no evals, no test-driven, we're just like vibes only prompt engineering.
And maybe, I mean, you switched over to this very quickly then, like, was it just obvious
from the beginning?
You're like, we just can't do it that other way.
We should not raw dog any of these prompts.
Yeah, I think the biggest thing, first of all, depends on the use case.
For a lot of things that we were working on, for better or for worse, there was a right
answer.
And if you get the wrong answer, lawyers are not going to be happy about it.
You know, I had been a lawyer myself, but also been signing lawyers for a decade.
Every time we made the smallest mistake in anything that we did, we heard about it immediately,
right?
And so I had that voice in my head, maybe, as I was going through this process.
And that...
I was learning from the 10 years of slogging through pre-LMs.
You're like, no, it has to be 100%.
Oh, yeah.
It's probably true of way more domains than we realize, actually.
It could be.
And the other thing that we were thinking about a lot is, you can lose faith in these
things really quickly, right?
You have one bad experience, especially if it's your first experience is bad.
And you're like, you know, maybe I'll check on this AI stuff a year from now, especially
if you're a busy lawyer, not a technologist.
So we knew we had to make that first encounter, the first week, really, really work for the
lawyer, or else they're not going to invest in it deeply.
So let's talk a bit about OpenAI01, because it is a very different model.
I mean, up to this point with GPT-4 and all that previous generation, the analogy in terms
of the intelligence is sort of the kind of system one thinking and the Daniel Kahneman
type of intelligence, right?
He has this whole economic theory.
You want the Nobel Prize around it.
System one thinking is just very fast.
It's kind of these decisions that humans make very intuitively and based on patterns, and
LLMs are fantastic at that.
But they're terrible at the executive function.
Because what I'm hearing with all the stuff that you're describing is kind of you're just
giving the LLM like executive function is like, how do you think it's right?
How do I manage you?
It's really that slower thinking.
And I think 01 is exciting.
We haven't seen things built yet, because it just got announced a few days ago, right?
I think it's getting to that system two thinking.
And I think this has been a big area of research, which I saw a lot in NeurIPS a year ago, where
a lot of the researchers were excited to unlock this, because this is the missing piece toward
AGI.
Let's talk about what are your thoughts on 01 and how this changes.
So first of all, I think 01 is a very impressive model.
Like with other things, we gave it the kinds of tests that we knew were failing.
It's not just math.
The degree of thoroughness, precision, intelligence apply to some of these questions.
And sometimes it's the stuff that you wouldn't expect you need a super smart model to do.
Like in one of the tests that we run, we give it a lawyer's real legal brief.
But we edited very slightly some of that lawyer's quotations to the case to make it a wrong
quotation or wrong kind of summarization of his case.
So it's like a 40-page legal brief.
You alter things with just adding the word like not can change the meaning of something
entirely.
And then we give the full text of the case as well to the AI.
And we say, well, what did the lawyer get wrong about this case, if anything?
And literally every LLM before that would be like, nothing.
It's perfectly right.
And it's just not a precise thinker about some of the very nuanced things that we altered
about the brief to make it slightly wrong.
And 01 gets it immediately.
Like you said, it thinks actually for a while.
It sits there for a minute.
You're like, is this thing on?
But then it starts answering.
And it's like, oh, well, change an and to a neither nor.
So those are the kinds of tests that you kind of expect even, frankly, earlier AI LLMs to
be able to pass, but just could not.
And all of a sudden 01 is even doing these things that take precise, detailed thinking.
Obviously, we don't have the internals on how 01 really works.
We have this broad idea of chain of thoughts.
Seemingly, we know that if open AI had a giant corpus of internal monologue of people thinking
through doing things step by step, 01 would be even a lot better.
It sort of rhymes with the thing you did to put your first step on the moon, right?
It rhymes with break it down into chunks where you can get to 100% accuracy instead of just
throw it all in the context window and maybe magically it will work.
Do you think that that's what's happening then?
I think there's a shot that they've had maybe change what their contractors are doing.
Instead of just doing input in, answer out, they're doing input in, how would I think
about solving this problem?
And then answer out.
The interesting thing is then it's kind of limited by the intelligence of the people
writing those instructions.
One of the things that we're investigating for what it's worth with 01 is can we prompt
it to tell it what to think about during its thinking process and inject...
Again, we've hired some of the best lawyers in the country.
How would some of the best lawyers in the country think about solving this problem?
We have no conclusive evidence one way or the other yet that this dramatically improves
things. It's so early and just not enough time yet has passed.
There's a chance that one of the new prompting techniques with 01 is teaching it not just
how to answer the question, what examples of good answers look like, but how to think.
And I think that's another really interesting opportunity here is
injecting domain expertise or just your own intelligence.
I'm just so thankful because I think you're sort of sharing the breadcrumbs.
There are a great many other spaces where this technology is just beginning.
You go to pretty much any company, people have no concept of what's just happened.
They actually literally still repeat all of those tired tropes of,
oh, you better be fine-tuning.
These things are just not connected to what we're seeing day-to-day with startups and
founders trying to create things for users.
What I'm kind of glad for is that we get to actually share this news, this knowledge,
because even the things we talked about, you should probably do evals.
There's a lot of alpha in getting to 100%, not just 70%.
These are sort of the breadcrumbs that will actually go on to create
all of the billion-dollar companies, maybe thousands of them, actually.
We hope so.
I think that you're starting to see a lot of other fields like law really level up.
When you don't have to spend millions of dollars in six months literally in a basement reading
document by document by document, when you actually can just get past that and get just
the results, now you're thinking strategically and intelligently.
The unlock for these companies is that they currently pay millions of dollars in salaries
for these jobs to be done.
Each of them.
For any company to come out with an AI that can do even 80% of that, the value is really there.
I just want to encourage people to not give up based on those tropes.
Oh, it hallucinates too much, it's too inaccurate, it's too whatever.
If we're an example of anything, it's like there's a path and you can do it.
And there's some good news in that, you know what?
The jobs aren't going to go away, they'll just be more interesting.
That's what I think, yeah.
Well, with that, we're out of time.
But Jake, thank you so much for being with us.
Thanks for having me.
See you guys next time.