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Comment by noitpmeder | Hacker News Reader

Your take on lawyers is absolutely insane. If you don't think the extremely specialized and well trained professionals can successfully navigate contracts then I can't wait for the absolute garbage the LLMs spit out when faced with similar challenges.

Honestly, same for doctors and accountants. Unless these model providers are willing to provide "guarantees" that they will compensate for damages faced as a result of their output.

Doctors and Lawyers are required in many areas to carry malpractice insurance. Good luck getting "hot new AI legal startup" to sign off on that.

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While malpractice insurance exists for human docs and lawyers, there is not really any difference between an ai-powered lawyer drawing up a contract, an ai-powered doc reviewing a chart and recommending next steps, and a self-driving car making a turn.

The most obviously "lethal" case (cars) is already in large scale rollout worldwide.

At scale, self-driving car "errors" will fall under general liability insurance coverage, most likely. Firms will probably carry some insurance as well just in case.

LLMs already write better prose than 95% of humans and models like o3 reason better than 90% of humans on many tasks.

In both law and medicine there are many pre-existing safeguards that have been created to reduce error rates for human practitioners (checklists, text search tools (lexis nexis, uptodate, etc.), continuing education, etc.) which can be applied to AI professionals too.

> LLMs already write better prose than 95% of humans and models like o3 reason better than 90% of humans on many tasks.

Except except lawyers are ~.4%[1] of the population in the United States, so that 95% isn’t very impressive

[1] https://www.americanbar.org/news/profile-legal-profession/de...

Fair point, but how much billable legal work requires that caliber of skill? I'd argue that 80% of it could probably be done with an o3 or o4 caliber model with some safeguards built into the pipeline and perhaps a bit of specialized training or MoE guardrails, human review, etc.

I think the mistake people make is misunderstanding the slope of the S-curve and instead quibbling over the exact nature of the current reality. AI is moving very fast. A few years ago I'd have said that at most 25% of legal work could fall to AI.

Note that this massive change happened in less time than it takes to educate one class of law school grads!

If AI is so good at prose, why haven't I heard about any breakout best sellers?

openAI models are good at solid, fluent academic style prose. DeepSeek R1 can sound fresh and can use more "voices" that feel authentic to the reader. Grok-3 is close behind.

Writing good prose is a far different skill than coming up with a compelling and innovative plot and style.

As a data point, OpenAI now blocks o3 from doing the "continue where the story left off" test on works of fiction. It says "Sorry, I can't do that".

Wow that's great.

/s to make it obvious

> Unless these model providers are willing to provide "guarantees" that they will compensate for damages faced as a result of their output.

That's how we will get to $20,000/month agents.

They only have to be slightly cheaper than hiring doctors and lawyers though.

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