Hello, and welcome to your weekly dose of Big Tech news and insights. I’m your host Alistair Barr. My dog Maisie is having surgery soon, so keep her in your thoughts.
I recently met a friend for coffee, and he shared some surprising news. After working in cloud computing for roughly 20 years, he’s moving from Silicon Valley to the UK. Would you leave Silicon Valley right now? Where would you go? (Send me a note if you want to share.) If you’re interested in living in other places, check out our stories on moving to India, Canada, and Spain.
Agenda
- This week, we’re talking about how generative AI is changing professional services, especially law firms and consulting.
- We’ll also take a look at the Silicon Valley chatter right now, including Meta’s turning point, Google’s pickle, and Microsoft’s new AI vision.
- And I’ll experiment with an AI tool and show you the results — something I hope to do each week, and get your responses and recommendations.
Central story unit
I went to a party in San Francisco recently. Yeah, I know, crazy. Actually, it was a bit wild, in a lovable, techy way.
StackBlitz threw a “hackathon” event to show off its AI coding service called Bolt.new. It’s a hot product right now, and the party was packed. The Chainsmokers DJ-ed, and I zipped around chatting to as many people as possible, with my tech buddy Dave in support (if questions got too technical!).
I met one person who said she worked at Harvey, a startup that’s using generative AI to help lawyers operate more efficiently and automate parts of legal work.
I asked what she did, and she said she was a lawyer. I assumed she’d be a software engineer, working for an AI startup. But no, she’s a fully qualified attorney who, instead of advising clients, helps to train Harvey’s AI models to be better at law.
Right on cue, BI’s Melia Russell has an in-depth, exclusive look at Harvey. She visited founder Winston Weinberg and learned some important scoopy stuff about the company’s latest moves and how it’s tackling growing competition in the suddenly hot legal tech market.
The legal profession is pretty well suited to large language models and generative AI. It’s based mostly on rules, laws, and other dense, complicated text. Legions of law firm associates usually spend years learning how to parse and interpret this information for clients.
Now, all this content, along with decades of legal decisions and other records, is being used as training data to develop specialized AI models and tools. AI needs high-quality training data, and in the legal profession there’s a ton of it.
The end result is tools like Harvey that can automate some of the busy work that previously bogged lawyers down, and could change how the entire profession operates.
You know what other industry has AI potential? Consulting. The Big Four, Deloitte, EY, PwC, and KPMG, are investing in AI agents to “liberate” employees from thousands of hours of work a year. For instance, generative AI tools are pretty good at creating PowerPoint slide presentations. Do you feel liberated?
News++
Other BI tech stories that caught my eye lately:
Eval time
My take on who’s up and down in the tech industry right now, including updates on Big Tech employee pay. This is based on an evolving, unscientific system I developed myself. (A bit like AI model benchmarking these days!)
UP: Tim Cook probably breathed a sigh of relief after the US and China paused those really high tariffs. Although it’s not out of the woods yet, Apple stock jumped this week.
DOWN: Google is in an antitrust quagmire, and ChatGPT may be eating into its prized Search business. Take a look at this metric. It’s not great. We’ll see if the company has answers next week at its big I/O conference.
COMP UPDATE: This data from Levels.fyi made me look. Software engineers (SWEs) — if you’re not in AI, your tech compensation may not rise as much as it once did:
From the group chat
Other Big Tech stories I found on the interwebs:
AI playground
This is the time each week when I try an AI tool. Is it better than what I could have done myself? Was it faster and more efficient than asking a technical colleague for help? I need you, dear reader, to help. What am I doing wrong? What should I do, or use, next week? Let me know.
I started off simple. I asked ChatGPT (Enterprise 4o) to create an image that sums up the past week in tech. I told it to use Business Insider style. Here’s what it came up with:
This is after a couple of pretty bad initial attempts. The image is not bad, but not amazing. The Samsung blue blob logo is floating by itself down there. Why? Who knows? It’s true that Google is prepping for I/O. It also seems to have mixed up Apple and Samsung? And I couldn’t find news related to new real-time features added recently to OpenAI’s GPT-4o model. (I asked OpenAI’s PR dept and will let you know if they respond.) It used an old BI logo, too.
User feedback
I would love to hear from anyone who reads this newsletter. What am I doing wrong? What do you want to see more of? Specifically, though: This week, I want to hear back from folks who work in professional services, such as lawyers and consultants.
Attorneys: What’s your experience been with Harvey AI and similar AI tools so far? Has this tech helped you get stuff done faster and better for clients? Or not? Are you worried legal AI tools might replace you in the end? Will it change the law firm business model? Or is this another tech flash in the pan that won’t amount to much? Let Melia Russell and me know at [email protected] and [email protected].
Same question for people who work at consulting firms. Any insights or views, reach out to my excellent colleague Polly Thompson at [email protected].
Read the full article here
