YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Katz

lines on the record: 51
first: 2025-07-28
most recent: 2025-07-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Do you even have to think about it? Do you have to think about it anymore? I do have to think about it, but if you do it enough, it does become second nature. I would say that whenever I'm speaking in Someone like you who in these types of settings, I think a lot more. The pressure's on and you get very nervous, but it does help you. And it goes back to what I was saying about writing. It's a way of thinking. You got to have structured thoughts and to take all the ideas in your mind, but to hopefully communicate them in an organized way so it's easy for the audience to learn it. That's a big part of what debating teaches.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About. I think that's a gap that's emerging because you can depend on AI systems to write. I think it can excuse people from thinking. And then I think the final thing, at least that I would point to, is that we are creating this crisis of validation. So it's no longer possible when you see something extraordinary online. I, by default, don't necessarily believe it. Whatever it is, I just assume it might be fake. So I'm not going to believe it until I've seen more corroboration, more validation. By default, I assume things aren't true. And that's pretty bad, actually. It used to be that if I saw something, I would assume it's true and it's kind of flipped the other way over the last five years. So I think AI is definitely created that new problem. But like we talked about earlier, I think there are ways you can use technology to help combat that, to fight back. I'm just not yet seeing too many of those capabilities at scale in the world.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you don't have to write anymore, really. You can just tell ChatGPT. You don't even need to tell ChatGPT in proper English. Your prompt can be quite badly constructed and it kind of works out what you're trying to say. And I think what I observe is that people's ability to sit down and write something coherent that takes you on a journey is actually getting worse because of their dependence on these external systems. And I think that's very, very bad because writing to me is deeply linked to thinking. In some ways, if you can't write a cogent sequential explanation of your thoughts that tells me that your thinking might be quite muddled. And Bezos had a similar principle. He would ban slide decks and insist on a six-page memo because you can hide things in a slide deck, but in a six-page memo, you have to know what you're talking about.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think that's one area AI, at least today, has not solved. It's a new problem, is generating incremental text has gotten dramatically cheaper and easier than it ever was. I'd say another thing I observe, second thing is... People are losing the skill of writing.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're definitely creating new problems, and this is true of all technology that's significant. It's going to solve a lot of problems, but it's going to create new ones. I certainly think that with AI, one thing I'd say point to three things. Number one, we are creating more text. And a lot of it is not that useful. So we're generating a lot more content for better or for worse, right? So you see more blogs because it's easy to write a blog now. You're seeing more articles, more LinkedIn status updates and more content online. Whether that's good or bad, we are generating more things for people to read. And what may happen is people may just read less because it's harder to sift through the noise to find the signal. Or they may rely more on the systems of information they're used to to get that confirmation.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their formative years as some previous generations did because there are so many different screens that have the opportunity to intercept that interaction. And they're hungry for it, but I wonder if they were models getting trained, they're getting less data in the very area where humans need to be, it sounds like from our conversation, even sharper because the AI systems aren't going to help us. Are we perhaps creating a new class of problems or overlooking some areas even as these brilliant systems are coming online?”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rabbit hole. All right, let me try to bring this all together with you then. What problems are we creating that you can see already, perhaps, with the solutions that we're bringing to bear? So we've got this capability to analyze unstructured data, to come up with some answers more quickly, to give humans perhaps higher order work to do. I think we've talked about how there's this whole human interaction realm that right now isn't getting addressed as deeply by AI systems. And my observation as the father of a couple, what Jen is it, Z now, if you're under 20, like they're not getting as much of that high quality, high volume human interaction in”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There absolutely is. I mean, it's a reminder that these systems reflect their creators to some extent, while a lot of the, like you say, why there's a movie her, it's why there's a lot of AI voices are female, it's partly because they were made by men. I don't say that's criticized them, but It's a reflection of some of the bias involved in building these systems, as well as lots of other complex social problems, I guess, that explain why we have a prominent AI girlfriends, but not at least not yet. I haven't heard about many AI boyfriends. Similar things do happen.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have seen systems and not much is written about these systems, but we've seen technologies that are extremely convincing, one-on-one. So there was a company called Character AI, which was acquired by Google. And really what it did was build AI avatars that people could interact with. And it would sometimes license those avatars to different companies. We saw a huge surge in AI girlfriends. We saw a huge surge in AI for therapy. We're seeing people have private, intimate conversations with AI. And what character we're really good at was learning from those interactions what would convince you. What is it I need to say to you to make you change your mind or to make you do something I want? And I think that's a growing area of AI research that could easily go badly if it's not managed.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Concerned about something, but they feel like they don't know enough about the point and they don't want to come to the meeting ignorant. Well, they'll do their research in advance. And so I think AI is helping before the fact. And then after the fact, we're definitely seeing people basically look at the game tape. All the meetings that Robin are recorded, we use AI systems to record all our meetings. Transcripts are produced, action items are produced, summaries are produced. And people are asking themselves, how could I have run that meeting better? I feel like the conflict I had with this person didn't go the way I wanted. What could I have done differently? And so I think AI is helping there. I'd say final point.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think you're right. In the moment interpersonal communication, that is, at least today, something that is very human. And it only comes, you only get better at these things through practice because they're so real time. I mean, knowing how to respond, knowing how to react, knowing how to adjust your tone, knowing how to read the room and to maybe change course. I don't see how at least today AI is helping with that. But I think you can maybe think about that as in-game. But before and after the game, AI can be really powerful. So people in my company will often use AI in advance of a one-to-one or in advance of a meeting where they know they want to bring something up and they want some coaching on how they can land the point as well as possible. Or maybe they're...”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are people the wild card? When I see the procedural dramas or see the movies and the closing arguments and the things that lawyers do, very often understanding your own strengths as a communicator, your own impact in a room, understanding people's mindsets, their body language can be very important. And right now, I'm not sure, at least at this stage, we're close to a time when AI is going to help us get that much better at dealing with people. Yeah, at dealing with facts, at dealing with huge unstructured data sets, with analyzing tons of video or images to identify faces. But to know how to respond, what to say, how to adjust our tone to reassure or convince someone. Not sure we're anywhere near that, are we?”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Today, to helping build Robin AI. I would say as well, just focusing on individuals, because at any given time, especially in a startup, you really need to find a way to put people in the position where they can be in their flow state and do their best work. Because it's really hard being in a startup where you don't have all the resources and you're going up against people with way more resources than you. You basically need everybody at the top of their game. That means you're going to have to coach individuals, not just collectively. And that was a big learning I took from working on debate.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Find a way to understand both sides because then you'll be able to position your side best. You'll know the strengths and weaknesses of what you want to say. And I'd say as well, final thing, it was all about coaching individuals. Each person had a different challenge or different strengths, different things they needed to work on. Some people would maybe speak too quickly. Some people were not confident speaking in big crowds. Some people were not good when they had too much time to think. And you have to find a way to coach each individual to manage their weaknesses and bring the team together so that they're more than the sum of their parts. And so when we're building software, I see this challenge all the time, right? Number one, we're dealing with systems that require different expertise. No one is good at everything that we do. We've got legal experts. We've got researchers. We've got engineers. And they all need to work together using their strengths, managing their weaknesses so that they're more than some of their parts. And so that's been a huge lesson that I apply.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, all the time I see the similarities between coaching the England team and running my business. I think that when you're coaching debate, the number one thing you're trying to do is to help people learn how to think. Because in the end, they're going to have to be the ones who stand up and give a five or seven minute speech in front of a room full of people with not a lot of time to prepare. And when you do that, you're going to have to think on your feet. You're going to have to really find a way to come up with arguments that you think are going to convince the people in the room. For me, it was all about helping teach them that there's two sides to every story that beneath all of the information and facts, there's normally some valuable principle at stake in every clash or every issue that's important. And you want to try and tap into that emotion and that conflict when you're debating.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You coached in England debate team seven, eight years ago. How do you do that, particularly at the individual level when you see the strengths and weaknesses of a person? How do you coach them to debate more effectively? And are there ways that you translate that into how you direct a team to build software?”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is being black and white, but the truth is almost all of the law is heavily debated. That's what the Supreme Court is for basically. It's to resolve ambiguity and debate. If there was no debate, we wouldn't need all these judges and these court systems. And so for me, it's really shaped a lot of my way I think in a lot of my life. It's why I think free speech, it's why I think how AI is used in social media is such an important issue for society because I can see very easily how it's going to shape the way people think, the way people argue or don't argue. And I can see the implications of that.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you say, my family were arguing all the time. It was gathered around, watch the news together and argue about every story. It really helped me to develop a level of independent thinking because there was no credit for just agreeing with someone else. You really had to have your own perspective. It encouraged me to think about what I was saying more than anything else because you could get torn apart if you haven't really thought through what you have to say. And it made me value debate to help you change your mind as well, to help you find the right answer coming to a conversation, wanting to know the truth, and not just wanting to win the argument. And so for me, those are all skills that you observe in the law. Law is ambiguous. I think people think of the legal...”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Debate recently, which was it was really interesting, but we now have AI systems that could give you a live fact check during the debate, or it could give you a live Alternative perspective during the conversation, wouldn't that be great for society? Wouldn't it be good if we could use AI to have more robust conversations? And like you say, the gamified search for truth, I think it can be done in a way that's entertaining, that's engaging, that ultimately drives more engagement than what we've had in the past.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's what we should be doing. I don't know that I'm confident we're yet seeing that, but if you go back to what we said earlier, I actually think what we've observed over the last five or six years at least is people becoming, there's less and less debate, actually. People are in their communities, whether they're real or digital. They're getting their own facts. And they're actually not engaging with the other side. They're not seeing the other side's point of view. They're getting the information that's served to them. So almost the opposite of debate. I think what we need is we need to use these systems to do a really robust job, like you said, of surfacing all of the information that's relevant, of characterizing both sides. And I think that's really possible. For instance, in a political debate, I watched some of the presidential debates and I watched the New York mayoral.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do we need a new model of debate in the era of AI? Should these models be debating each other? Should there be debates within them? Do they get scored in a way that helps us understand either the quality of the facts, the quality of the logic in which those facts have been strung together to come to a conclusion, the quality of the analysis that was developed from that conclusion? Is that really part of what we're trying to claw toward right now is how to gamify a search for truth and vetted analysis in this sea of data we've got now.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Child in that family leading me right to where I was hoping to get is debate because to me game of debate is gamified truth search. You're searching for truth and you create these sort of warring tribes and they assemble facts and they fight with each other. And it's like, no, here's my set of facts and here's my argument that I'm making based on that. And okay, well, here's mine. Well, here's why yours are wrong. Or why you're using yours wrong or you forgot about this. And it happens out in the public square and then people can see and then people decide who wins. And it's fun. But the payoff is that we're smarter at the end. We should be, right? We've gotten to sift through and pick apart these things, hopefully on the right basis if the teams have done their work.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Build countermeasures that make it easy for society to basically get what we want from them. And I think community notes citations, these are all children in the same family for trying to understand how these models truly work and are affecting us.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This at least in the popular social paradigm is community notes. Because community notes is a way for someone to say this isn't true or this is false or you're not getting the whole picture here. And it's not edited by a shadowy editorial board. It's generally crowdsourced. Wikipedia is another good example. These are systems where you're basically using the wisdom of the crowds to validate or disvalidate information. In our context, we use citations. So we're saying don't trust the model tested. It's going to give you an answer, but it's also going to give you an easy way to check for yourself if we're right or if we're wrong. For me, this is the most interesting part of AI applications. It's all well and good having capabilities. But as long as we know that they can be used for bad ends or they can be inaccurate, we're going to have to.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Them better. It's not nourishing. There are no nutrients in a lot of the content we're getting served to us on these social media platforms, whether it's politics, whether it's people squabbling, whether it's culture wars. These systems have been giving us information that's designed to get our attention. And it seems like that's just not good for us. It's not nutritious. So I think that on the whole, to date, we're not doing very well in the battle to search for truth because the models haven't been optimized to do that, actually. They've been optimized to get our attention. And so I think you need platforms that find ways to combat that. So to the question of how does systems like us, but also more broadly, how do AI applications help combat this? I think it is by creating tools that help people validate the truth of something. The most interesting example”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think a lot of this comes down to validation. Sam Altman said something that I thought was really insightful. He said that the algorithms that power most of our social media platforms, X, Facebook, Instagram, they're the first example of what AI practitioners call misaligned AI at scale. And what we mean by that is systems where the AI models are not actually helping achieve goals that are good for humanity. So the algorithms in these systems, this is before ChatGPT, but they are using machine learning to work out what kind of content to surface for people. And so it turns out people are entertained by really outrageous, really extreme content. It just keeps their attention. I don't think anybody, though, would say that's good for people. It makes”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And fundamentally, we've got a sparring partner that helps us to craft our message. So I think AI is basically going to make these things better and worse all at the same time. My hope is that The right side wins people in search of truth, they're able to be more compelling now that they've got a whole host of new tools available to them. If they use them and they learn how to use them, and it's not guaranteed that people will learn these new systems unless people like me and others, people like you, are out there helping to proselytize on the benefits and capabilities these things bring.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For people who are looking for facts that just back them up and validate what they already believe, it's going to make that much easier. It's going to give you the world's most efficient mechanism for delivering information of the type that you choose. But I don't think all is lost because I think as well people who are trying to provide truth or help change people's perspective, show them a new way. We have a new tool in our armory to do that, right? We have this incredible research assistant called Deep Research that we never had before, which means we can start to deliver more compelling facts. We can get a better sense of what types of facts or examples are going to convince people using technology. We can build better ads. We can make more convincing statements. We can road test buzzwords. We can be more creative because we have”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think that you observe confirmation bias with or without AI throughout society. People in search of facts that confirm their prior beliefs, there's something comforting to people about being told and validated that they were right. And whether you've got whatever technology you might use, that's just a baseline for all human beings, I think, is this desire to feel like they're correct. And so I think if you want to shape how people think, you want to convince people of something that you know to be true, you have to start from the position that they're not going to want to hear it if it's inconsistent with or incongruent with their prior beliefs. And I think what AI can do is it can make these things better and it can make these things worse, right?”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's the matter of facts, and then there's what people are inclined to believe. And I'm getting closer to the debate issue here, but sometimes you have facts that you string together in a certain way, and it's not exactly true, but people do really want to believe it, right? They embrace it. And then sometimes you have truths and people just completely want to dismiss it. The quality of the information, the quality of the truth or confusion doesn't necessarily correlate with how likely your audience is to go, yeah. Richard's right. How do we deal with that at a time when these models are designed to be convincing? Regardless of whether they're stringing together the facts to create a truth or whether they're stringing together the facts to create something else.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that that is in itself a very dangerous polarizing set of topics. And I think we need to certainly ask ourselves the same questions that we've asked with the last generation of technologies to this new technology. Because that's what it is. AI is just a new way of delivering a lot of that information. In some ways, it's a more effective way. It's going to do it in a more convincing and powerful way. So it's even more important that we ask ourselves how do we want information to be presented? How do we want to steer these systems so that they deliver truth, so that they avoid bias? It's a big reason why Elon with Grok has taken such a different approach.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's right. I think that. As a society, we need to use technology to enhance our collective goals. We shouldn't let the technology just run wild. Now, that's not to say that we should regulate these things, because I'm generally quite against that. I think we should let innovation happen to the greatest extent reasonably possible. But we should have a say as consumers. We do have a say in how these systems work and how they're designed and how they're deployed. I think as it relates to the search for truth, the people who own these systems and who use them, they've grappled with these questions in the past. So if you want to Google search certain questions like the racial disparity in IQ in the United States, you're going to get a fairly curated answer from the Google search.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How does that play into the way we as a society should think about what AI does? AI systems are going out, training on data points that might be facts, but The way those facts or those details or those data points get arranged. Ends up determining whether They're telling us something true, right?”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that's right. It's very difficult to really get to the truth. I mean, facts can be selectively chosen. I've seen spreadsheets and graphs that technically are facts, but they don't really tell the truth. So there's a big gap there.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it is. It's increasingly difficult because there are so many competing facts and there are so many different communities where people will selectively choose their facts. But you're right. You need to establish the reality, the core facts before you can really start to make decisions and start to debate what you should be doing and what should happen next. And I do think AI helps with all of these things. It can also make it more difficult. These technologies They can be used for good and bad. And so it's not obvious to me that we're going to get closer to establishing truth now that we have AI.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's right. That's right. You get to leverage the brand and the reputation of AWS, who are the biggest cloud provider in the world. And that second thing you get, you mentioned it there too, is we get basically a seat at the table for the biggest grocery store in the world. They have lots of customers and a lot of businesses make commitments to spend with AWS and they will first and foremost choose vendors who are hosted on their AWS marketplace. They'll go to them first. And so it gives us a position in the shop window to help us advertise to customers. That's really what the marketplace gives to Robin AI.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it helps give customers confidence that they can trust us. I think when we had the cloud and businesses started to adopt, the biggest reason that it took time for that adoption, as well as change management, was concern about security for business keeping their data secure is probably their single most important thing. It's a never event. You can't ever let your data go insecure. But for business to really get the benefit of AI, they're not going to be able to build everything themselves. They are going to have to partner with experts and with startups like Robin AI, but they need confidence that when they do that, especially with their most sensitive documents, that they're going to be secure, they're going to be protected. So the AWS marketplace, first and foremost, it gives us a way of giving our customers confidence that what we've done is robust, that our application is secure because AWS security vet”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look back and think about what they signed up for. I'll give you another quick example when Trump introduces executive order relating to DEI universities. A lot of universities in the United States needed to look back at, okay, what if we agreed? What's in some of our grant proposals? What's in some of our legal documents? What's in some of our employment contracts? Who are we engaging as consultants? And is that in danger given these executive orders? And we saw that as a big use case too. So I think it's permanent change is a reality for business and AI is going to help us to navigate that.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there is work to do to enable AI to be effective, but we are absolutely seeing customers who are global businesses trying to understand what the regulatory landscape means for them. And that's going to keep happening every time there's regulatory change, every time there's new laws passed.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's exactly right. Any type of change in the world triggers people to want to look back at what they've signed up for. And you're right. The most topical is this the tariff reform, which is affecting every global business for sure. And people want to look back at their agreements. They want to know, can I get out of this deal? Is there a way I can exit this transaction because we entered into it with an assumption about what it was going to cost and those assumptions have changed. And that's very similar to what we saw during COVID when people wanted to know, hey, can I get out of these agreements given that there's an unexpected huge pandemic happening? We're seeing the same thing now, but this time we have AI to help us. And so, yeah, people are looking back at historic agreements. I think they're realizing that they don't always know where all their contracts even are. They don't always know what's inside them. They don't know who's responsible for them.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To specific sources of information that are legally verified so that we know that we're referencing things you can rely on. And I'd say the third is that we're educating our customers and reminding them that they're still lawyers. You know, I used to write cases for courts all the time. That was my job before I started robbing. And I knew back then it's my responsibility to make sure every source I reference is 100% correct. It doesn't matter which tool you use to get there. It's on you as a legal professional to validate your sources before you send them to a judge, before you even send them to your client. So some of this is about personal responsibility because AI is a tool. You can misuse it no matter what safeguards we put in place. So we have to teach people don't rely exclusively on these things because they can lie confidently. You're going to want to check for yourself.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is it the number one question our customers ask? And I do think it's a big part of why you need specialist models for the legal domain. Because it's a specialist subject area. It's a specialist domain. You need to have applications and people like Robin who are not just taking ChatGPT or Anthropic and doing nothing with it, you need to really optimize its capabilities for the domain. So in terms of what we're doing, to answer your question directly, I mean, we include citations with very clear links to everything the model does. So every time we give an answer, you can quickly validate the underlying source material. That's the first thing. The second thing is we are working very hard to only rely on external valid, authoritative data sources. So we connect the model.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“References. We explain where we got our answers from. And so the role of the junior lawyer or the senior lawyer is now, hey, use Robin first, and then your jobs to make sure that it went correctly, it's been used in the right way.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI goes first, basically. And that's a big transformation. But you see this in the coding space, which I think they got ahead of adoption in the legal space, but we're fast catching up. But a lot of engineers who are using these coding platforms, if you talk to them, they'll tell you, for the most part, they want the AI to write all of the code first. But they're not necessarily going to just hit enter and use that code in production. They're going to check. They're going to review. They're going to question and interrogate it and redirect the model where they want it because these models still make mistakes. And so their hands are still on the driving wheel. It's just that they're doing it slightly differently. They're using AI to go first and then people are being used to check. And pretty much everything we do, we make it easy for people to check our work. We include pinpoint citations.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With AI, they can handle more work internally. So they don't have to send as much to their law firms as they're used to because they essentially have this leverage to tackle what used to be quite difficult pieces of work. And so there's actually more work that they can do themselves now instead of having to send it outside of the house. And then there's some buckets of work where you don't need people at all. You can just rely on systems like Robin to answer those compliance questions. So you're right. The work is shifting, no doubt about it. For the most part, AI can't replicate. It's not a whole job yet. It's parts of a job, if that makes sense. So we're not seeing anybody cut headcount as a result of using our technologies, but we do think they have a much more efficient way to scale and they're reducing their dependence on their law firms over time because they can do more in-house.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what we've observed is that if you think about the past, if a business had legal problems, they would either send them to a law firm or they would try and handle them internally with their own legal team.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm trying. I'm trying my best. This is exactly you're hitting the nail on the head, though. A lot of this stuff caused a lot of pain for a lot of businesses, either through compliance and ethics training, through long, sometimes dull courses. We can make that so much more interesting, so much more interactive. Now that you can use AI technologies like Robin. So we're really working on it and we're helping solve a whole vast range of legal use cases that in the past you needed people to do.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We help solve concrete legal problems. So a good example is every day our customers, organizations, they want to know whether or not they're doing something that's compliant with their company policies. And those policies are uploaded to our platform. And anybody can just ask a question that historically would have gone to the legal team or the compliance team. They can say, I've been offered tickets to the Rangers game. Am I allowed to go under the company policy? And we can use AI to intelligently answer that question every day businesses are signing contracts. That's how they record pretty much all of their commercial transactions. And now they can use AI to look back at their previous contracts and then use that to help them answer questions about the new contract they're being asked to sign. So if you're doing a deal with the Rangers and you've worked with the Mets.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's correct. I mean, we've always been limited by the technology that's available. Before ChatGPT, we had very traditional AI models. Today we have, as you know, much more performant models. And so that's just allowed us to expand our ambition. And you're completely right. It's not just about contracts anymore. It's about policies. It's about regulations. It's about the different laws that apply to a business. We want to help them understand their entire legal landscape.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Year and a half ago, I talked to you, and your description was a lot heavier on contracts. But you said, yeah, we're heading in a direction where we're going to be handling more than that. It sounds like maybe you're more firmly in that direction now.”
2025-07-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Can we ever trust an AI lawyer? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT