AI Has An Overeating Problem + Episode 41 With Jamie Tso & Ray Sun
Let me supersize that new podcast episode for you
These days, when I read about AI, I’m reminded of “Hungry Mungry,” a poem by Shel Silverstein. Hungry Mungry tells the story of a man whose hunger is so insatiable that he devours the army, the police, and several large cities in North America. Eventually, finding nothing else left to eat, poor Mungry slowly devours himself.
The final stanza reads:
Then sitting there in the cold dark air, he started to nibble his feet,
Then his legs, then his hips then his neck, then his lips
Till he sat there just gnashin' his teeth
'Cause nothin' was nothin' was nothin' was nothin' was nothin' was left to eat.
Hey there, I’m Zach Abramowitz and I am Legally Disrupted! And I’m starting to think that AI has an overeating problem. Prediction-flex alert: all the way back in March of 2023 and long before SaaSpocalypse, I wrote about AI replacing incumbent #legaltech software.
But it’s really getting out of hand these days as AI begins, like Hungry Mungry, to eat itself. The AI application layer has always been threatened by the foundation model. But the vibe is beginning to shift.
Maybe the out of the box model cannot do what the fancier legal application does, but what if a lawyer could simply code those features themselves? What if they could make it look and feel exactly like they wanted it to.
The new poster child of “Code it yourself counsel!” is Jamie Tso, the Hong Kong based lawyer and founder of the Legal Quants community who began replicating features of some of well known legal AI tools and open sourcing them. Other lawyers began taking inspiration from Jamie, something we began immediately flagging to KWS clients.
I reached out to Jamie on LinkedIn late last year to learn more about what he was doing. Crickets.
But the joke is on him because that just made me more interested.
Since then, this series of LinkedIn posts has blossomed into a highly exclusive community of over a hundred lawyer coders called Legal Quants. Finally, after some mild begging polite nudging, I was able to connect with Jamie and get him on the podcast with Legal Quants founder Raymond Sun. I learned during this conversation about the secret WhatsApp group that is home to this grassroots community (my request for admission was of course denied). Several listeners reached out to tell me that I sound giddy in this podcast. They’re right, I am giddy. That’s why we went close to an hour and a half in this episode. Jamie and Ray have real conviction about where the AI train is headed, namely that “The cost of developing software applications is going to zero.” They also have an open and creative mind about what that will mean for the profession. This is serious AI 2.0 second order effects thinking, and I’m here for it all. So grab a hot beverage, and before anyone else wakes up, treat yourself to a dose of Sunday disruption by watching the embedded YouTube link or find Zach Abramowitz is Legally Disrupted on Apple and Spotify.
Podcast 42 (Timo from Cosmonauts), 43 (Jarryd from Sandstone) and 44 (Josh from LawPro.ai have already been recorded and will drop soon, so subscribe to the podcast or follow the Legally Disrupted YouTube channel. Our audience on YouTube alone has grown by over 200% since September and more than doubled since November. Subscribing to this newsletter is another good way to keep up with the content.
Already subscribed? Share this newsletter with someone who needs some legal disruption in their life.