For the past decade, I have been consistently extolling the virtues and concerns of the impending “Exponential Technology” era. Well, it’s here.
The first manifestation of this was OpenAI’s DALL-E product, which I encountered at an MIT conference in April 2022. DALL-E 2 is a website that allows users to type in concepts or phrases and instantly generate corresponding artwork or images in any desired form. The results can be continuously refined to produce truly extraordinary creations.
Here are a few examples:
“A hamburger in the shape of a Rubik’s cube, professional food photography”
Image credit: Michael Howe-Ely
“A BBQ that is alive, in the style of a Pixar animated movie”
Image credit: Michael Howe-Ely
I recently had the opportunity to present these ideas, along with their likely implications, to a legal audience at Thomson Reuters’ Synergy 2022 conference. It quickly became clear that the effects of this technology will extend far beyond the realm of law, touching upon fields as diverse as writing, coding, financial modeling, prediction markets, business planning, and more.
Just a few weeks after my presentation, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a tool that demonstrates similar capabilities with language as DALL-E 2 does with images. I have spent the past month experimenting with ChatGPT, and the results are nothing short of astounding. Though it is not yet perfect, ChatGPT is incredibly powerful and can produce impressive results with minimal input. For instance, within just ten seconds, it was able to generate a fully-fledged lease document, complete with all necessary parameters.
Here is an example.
Within 10 seconds a full lease is produced with all parameters added. Just a portion displayed below.
Similarly, ChatGPT was able to create code for a smart contract to establish a law firm’s own blockchain-based token system in just 15 seconds. This one would allow for a law firm to have its own token, as an incentive for clients to use them, earning them a discount each matter they brought.
Having built these before, this was very impressive as a first pass and completed in 15 seconds.
It is becoming increasingly clear that AI will have a profound impact on “white collar” jobs in the coming years, contrary to the initial belief that it would primarily affect manual labor first. The potential implications of this technology are truly staggering and will likely bring about significant changes to the way we work and live.
There are a ton of other nuances to this, which I will be writing and vlogging about in the coming weeks.