The bigger problem with his argument IMO is that even with open models, it's still the person or organisation with the most money / access to GPU compute winning. They run the larger model (or collection of models), they can process more tokens through them in the same amount of time etc
Is it? Legal is rarely a genuine war of attrition and delays are the norm. AI is years/decades away from not needing humans in the loop verifying output, legal more than most. Correctness is more important than speed. Main skill is doc search but most cases easily fit in modern contexts.
So I don't think legal in particular needs the fastest/bestest compute.
Radical times may need radically different approaches.
> Everyone will have free or affordable access to these tools.
"access" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, yes everyone has access to the US healthcare system. Is it affordable for everyone? Not even close, but politicians will always phrase it that way as a non-agreement to proposals of universal healthcare.
Should any kind of "superintelligence" exist, it must be a public good, available to all. Not controlled by a small handful of oligarchs and profit seeking entities.