Cecilia Ziniti
Jun 29, 2024
Hi, GC AI Users - thank you for being amazing. We're so grateful and feel so lucky to work with you. AI had a big couple of weeks - a new model from Anthropic, lawyers saying AI makes them happier, and your editor’s 32nd birthday! Great age. 👠
Read time: 3 minutes 52 seconds
AI & Tech
🧥 Nvidia briefly dethroned Microsoft and Apple as the world’s most valuable company at a $3.3T market cap on the strength of AI. Note to self: buy another leather jacket.
📽 Runway ML announced its latest AI video model, Gen-3 Alpha, capable of 10-second+, highly realistic video clips.
🦒 Meanwhile, OpenAI's video AI, Sora, was the star in a new Toys R' Us's TV ad, below. Plus side, can you spot the toy giraffe that *does not* look like IP-protected Sophie the Teething Giraffe? PS - yes, Toys R' Us has been resurrected from Ch. 11 fame.
2️⃣ OpenAI acquired Multi, which allows remote control of computers. Wonder what for. Also OAI bought Rockset, an analytics database with real-time data indexing and querying capabilities. The rumor? OpenAI realized its in-house retrieval infrastructure was bad. That’s definitely what we noticed at GC AI, so we built our own document parsing abilities. It consistently beats ChatGPT at answering questions about uploaded documents. Study publishing soon.
🍀 Ilya Sutskever, the pushed-out OpenAI co-founder, has unveiled a new AI firm, Safe Superintelligence, Inc. He says, "our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles." Editors take: no product cycles? Good luck.
✍️ Anthropic launched a more powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It claims to beat OpenAI’s GPT-4o and to be faster and cheaper. We're testing it at GC AI now.
AI Adoption
📊 A poll this week of in-house lawyers follows a class tech adoption curve. Where are you? If you're at never ... reach out!
🙈Overheard: “My AI strategy is to not let my vendors triple their price for no value.” - VP of IT at a big bank, when asked what his AI goals were. Get this man's legal team GC AI and seeing value in ... 2 minutes?
🧮 Bain surveyed AI adoption, finding
87% of companies surveyed said they were already developing, piloting, or have deployed generative AI in some capacity.
More than 60% of companies see gen AI as a top three priority
As tools mature, it will start to prove better to buy purpose-built specialist tools (like GC AI), faster learning and higher adoption being factors.
Consumer, Regulatory, & Litigation
🫠 Remember Adobe’s mishap on its disclosure that is uses AI to review content? Adobe has since updated its terms, added non-contractual explainers accompanying each paragraph, and published a 6 minute, 3 part (!) video explaining their legal terms. Click below to watch, a good effort. Pro tip: if you have to do all this, your terms still aren't clear enough.
📞 Also, unrelated but coincidental, the FTC sued Adobe this week over its subscription practices, which allegedly included intentionally dropping phone calls of users calling customer support to cancel. Hear that static? Oh, whoops, gotta drop … I have a phone call with a regulator that courts won't be deferring to... ⛽️ Speaking of Chevron deference or lack thereof, here's GC AI's summary of the ruling and selected spicy quotes.
⛽️ Speaking of Chevron deference or lack thereof, here's GC AI's summary of the ruling and selected spicy quotes.
🍁The Vermont governor vetoed a broad data privacy bill, citing concerns about its impact on businesses. The bill would have allowed a private right of action.
🍎Apple will hold on releasing its AI features in the EU due to privacy concerns and the Digital Markets Act.
AI & IP
🎙️ All the big record labels are suing two AI music companies, Suno and Udio. Exhibit B from the Suno complaint is the hot one. Music folks can you tell from the notes? Click the image to listen to the AI version of Chuck Berry's famous song. Hm.
🤔 Editor's analysis: The RIAA and record labels do not mess around with IP. I'm surprised it took them this long to sue, when even Sam Atlman says he won't touch music AI due to copyright. The Suno CEO says, "our technology is transformative; it is designed to generate completely new outputs, not to memorize and regurgitate pre-existing content. That is why we don’t allow user prompts that reference specific artists.” Nice try? Full analysis from me here (thanks ALM).
📝The PTO did a webinar diving into its guidance on when inventions developed using AI can be patented and explaining that AI use by lawyers need not be disclosed to the PTO.
📓Forbes accuses hot AI search startup Perplexity of stealing text and images and infringing Forbes' copyrights. Perplexity apparently is ignoring robots.txt (the instructions websites give when they don't want to be crawled), and Forbes is calling the startup a "BS Machine." Meanwhile, OpenAI wrote another licensing check, to Time Inc.
AI & Law
⚖️ Jenner & Block SCOTUS partner Adam Unikowski did a fascinating study, where he inputted Supreme Court briefs for merits cases decided this term to AI. Claude consistently decided as the Supreme Court did or provided reasonable alternatives. Amazing. I caught up with Adam, who is pushing the firm to adopt AI and says that the firms must evolve including to keep up with sophisticated clients using AI (!). Smart man.
💰Clearbrief AI is AI for litigators that cite checks briefs - they raised $4m financing. Awesome founder - hi, Jackie! AI’s environmental costs.
🎓A Law schools are adding AI programs to meet demand. The ABA did a survey, finding 85% of law schools contemplate evolving their curricula to account for AI tools.
✅ Excellent AI report from UK law firm Ashurst. They surveyed 411 lawyers across the firm, and did blind studies to test detection and sentiment on AI. The findings match what we're seeing at GC AI:
Drafting fresh is among the best AI use cases, with 77% of people saying they "strongly agree" AI helped them develop legal advice more quickly. Yep. A product/privacy counsel told me they'd planned a few hours on a write-up of the new state privacy laws (15+ now), and it took ... 15 minutes.
Fun/Love: Like GC AI users (join our slack!), these law firm lawyers reported that AI made day-to-day life easier and helps folks feel more prepared.
Quality - lots of dimensions here (grammar, logical flow, accuracy, etc), and AI gets some things better than humans and needs more oversight in others. But net net, human + AI is the highest quality work.
Events & Trainings
AI Prompting with GC AI - now on YouTube
📺 The GC AI In-House Connect Event was a success - watch the recording here. Jennee Devore (amazing GC in Biotech) and Amy Guzman (powerhouse SaaS GC) showed elite prompting. Super practical session - have a watch and let us know what you think!
👩🏫July 16 - 201 Class - Advanced AI prompting for In-House Legal 201 class. Now co-taught with GC AI Co-founder and AI Engineer Bardia Pourvakil. 2 hours. 4.9 stars: Sign up here
👩🏫July 17 - 101 Interactive Class on Maven - AI prompting for In-House Teams. 90 minutes, super fun. Sign up here. ("Amazing session." "Love the interactivity." "Wow.")
🎥(Recording) AI in private equity. Our host MLA, and me, Rachel Dooley from Kirkland, and Alejandro Mosquera from KKR discussed how PE firms are using AI.
Random, Fun, and User love
📻 Police break into flat after Alexa device blasts loud music in 'party on its own'
🍔 McDonalds is pulling its AI drive-through features that recommended upsells like ice cream and bacon. (It was powered by older, pre-LLM AI tech from IBM.) Yum?
👰♀️ "Can I marry GC AI?" - Software company GC
💚 See the movie Inside Out 2. Besides great characters and story, it reflects excellent IP legal counseling from Disney legal.
✨ Awesome use case: GC AI helps craft a slack message to sales with pizazz.
Fun times! Thank you all for your support.
Best,
Cecilia and the GC AI Team
