> If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market?

Money. They won't have the money to pay for the tokens, or the best models, because they'll be unemployed. They also won't have the connections to get the clients.

When you're playing a game of "who has the best capital," the scrappy underdog worker with vastly less won't win.

The idea that making the economy even more capital intensive will some how equalize things is an insane fantasy only a software engineer could swallow.

> If AI suddenly makes it possible for a law firm to be run with a skeleton crew, then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market? And ultimately, if AI gets to be so good that it can competently do a lawyer's job, what reason do big law firms even have to exist? Who is going to hire them if they can just hire AI? The companies that are rushing so hard to replace their workers don't realise that AI is eventually going to replace them too.

Lawyers will be fine IMO, they’re a government protected guild whose key outputs have to be human certified, and where error has real consequences + can threaten licensure or lead to civil/criminal liability in the worst cases.

Not to mention that AI dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for filing lawsuits. Courts are already being inundated by pro se filings, mostly from nutters as usual, but some of which will have real merit. And entrepreneurial litigators will eventually figure out how to harness AI properly, some probably already have. All of those lawsuits will require lawyers to handle them. And this is without getting into the complex IP issues that AI raises.

I’d say that there might be some short term dislocation but demand for lawyers is about to go up, not down. Paralegals without specialized knowledge may be in for a hard time though.

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.

Why doesn't this extend one step further? Many of those "service provider" people no longer are needed? If you're a consultant for domain X, and you used to work at Big Consulting, and they fire you to replace you with AI... soon the customer will hire neither your new provider, or Big Consulting, and just use AI directly, if it's that good.

Certain professions have legal/regulatory protections, but thesis (a) "entrepreneurs replace big incumbent service providers" doesn't seem necessarily more stable compared to thesis (b) "the people who need the knowledge have their AI do it themselves". In order for (a) to be true without (b), the AI tools themselves have to be good enough to make the concentration of specialized knowledge and institutional expertise/history no longer critical; but not good enough that the would-be-entreprenurial-middleman's own specialized knowledge can't also be replaced.

The price of their work will go down and it might not be economical to do it at all. Theirs skills (as also many IT skills) will not be needed at that scale. In the same way as typing on a typewriter was a skill that gave economic opportunity not so long time ago. Now everything is an email and part of it is speech to text. When something becomes a commodity, the skilled providers need to find something new to sell on the market.

About the law firms, part of the job of a law firm is to give the corporate employee a "guarantee" that he won't be held accountable for doing something legally stupid. So a new lawyer is at great disadvantage if he don't have the contact he has build trust with. From a freind's law company with 50+ lawyers I know that junior lawyers fresh from uni need at least 4-5 years to build their client base. Then, they can leave and start their own taking part of that client base with them. This limits the number of people who can start their own company and most of them won't risk it in the age of AI, because it will be sales and marketing that will feed them, not their legal wizardry, especially when tasks like "check this agreement" won't be billed at the current insane rates.

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming.

why would anyone pay anyone else for anything when they could just get an AI to do it? any service would now be worthless, there will be people with hardware and people without. 3 futures:

one where the hardware is shared.

one where it is not.

one where the first person with enough of it kills everyone else.

We can take your train of thought further still. If AI ever becomes super good at lawyering, why would we even need law firms and lawyers at all?

We could feed legislation and constitution into the model and have it argue against other lawyer bots in court in front of a judge bot.

The author’s implied argument is that capital control’s the entrepreneurship game already.

There is only 1 top law firm, financiers of law firms have no interest in starting a race to the bottom. Foundation model labs will take a significant portion of the value, the remainder will be captured by entrenched monopolies.

Exactly right, it's Porter's Five Forces with Threats of Substitutes and Threats of New Entrants, which means that margins will be compressed massively, which means that being a lawyer will often mean lower wages. The p99() of lawyer wages will probably decline, but the max() will likely increase for the niches that are not adequately covered by AI use cases.

Lawyers will be fine they will work with legislators to make it illegal for AI to practice law. Then, even if the lawyers job is mostly presenting the work of a legal AI, they will still be employed. Other knowledge workers will need to wisen up and do the same.

Edit: same for any profession that requires professional accreditation: lawyers, doctors, cpas, professional engineers, etc.

Yeah... Take it even one step further, why would AI companies even sell access at all? They could just run competitor firms directly themselves, and that outcome is really the only way they can ever hope to make ROI, so for sure they'll do it if it ever becomes possible.

For some reason AI is able to replace engineers, doctors, lawyers but can do CEO’s and PR specialists. (!)

Every time these AI discussions happen, it’s my first thought, they even talk about the 1 person billion $ company concept but for some reason it’s never the CEO’s replaced and it’s never their industry taken over by the 1 person unicorn.

It’s very weird, it’s just obvious that once you are made redundant you just fill the gaps with AI and become the competitor.

Maybe they imagine that they have the X factor(unlike those engineers or musicians that are being replaced) and the people they laid off were low tier players anyway.

It simply doesn’t compute. The only possible way is to AI companies steal all the businesses of everyone and then unless they find a way to run a system where everyone is happy enough and occupied the “permanent underclass” overruns the AI folks and it becomes a public domain and the concept of intellectual property ownership disappears and other forces like vanity take over and after some conflict a brand new society emerges that runs like a cult with self imposed limits so that they can maintain a structure and healthy competition.

In that scenario, the AI owners become rentiers - able to charge as much as the market will bear for brokerage - and everyone else gets to offer their services via said brokerages, which charge the customer the most they can bear, and pay the worker the least.

Any economy of scale - which is, in a way, what allows knowledge economies to exist at all - will accrue to the middleman.

Good news for those able to master manual, craft skills to a degree most cannot. High-end tradespeople, specialist installation technicians and so on. Bad news for everyone else besides rentiers.

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.

What services would those be? You already stated the AI will eliminate the need for companies in many areas so I'm not sure how this fits in with that statement.

but just imagine the brave new world, where a law firm has super-duper-frontier model and you're trying to argue with it in a court with your latest best local oss model (only 6 month behind the bestests ones).

Here's another train of thought because you don't seem to understand how incentives or even lawyering works.

> then what's stopping all those people you fired from starting new law companies, where AI also does most of the work, and competing with you for the same market?

Your thinking is similar to the someone saying you can use LLMs to "research" stock market edges. The rub lies in knowing what research to do and what inputs to provide.

Big law firms are not big because they create similar outputs and that can be done using AI. They are "big" because they have connections and also know how to create better outputs.

Still to your point:

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.

If this was true then what you are saying is every thing is going to be commoditized due to AI. There is no quality difference.

That will drive prices down in the short term and in the long term people will form cliques like "Forum for AI enabled lawyers" or something similar to OECD and drive prices up. Thereby delivering even lesser value for increased cost. Enshittification at its finest. Not exactly the utopia you seem to be picturing.

By your logic, aren't the entreprenuers also middlemen?

The best early example of this is that Anthropic is already eating the lunch of all the new “AI security audit” companies. And they were only a few years old.

Those guys certainly thought they were being novel and creative, using AI to disrupt an expensive and labor intensive business model. But now with Claude Security, their own market share is going to be gobbled up before they can even get established.

> what's stopping all those people you fired..

Reputation, (or lack of it) and the big clients that come with it.

Isn't that obvious?

Law firms are useful because they have connections to the prosecution and judges. You can't just open up a law firm without that.

The big picture can be extended to all economic branches, where steady competition drives down profit margins to near zero, like it is the case for eg. grocery chains already. Functioning markets are solving distribution problems and maybe, some day we will even consider something like algorithmic/HF trading not as a margin siphon but as a (public) service of automated distribution. The bigger picture has to go beyond the How/Who into the the Why/When, which opens up the end conditions of profit driven enterprise and capitalism itself.

You realize that the limit of this is that the only people worth existing is the people with capital?

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming. AI will empower more people to provide useful services directly to other people, with less middlemen and menial work, and more direct problem solving.

Why do I need to buy products/services from this startups when I can just reverse engineer their product and use all my capital to make them?

> I foresee a wave of entrepreneurship coming

I foresee Claude etc being able to do much of that on a self-serve basis. The entrepreneurship you mention to me looks exactly opposite to what you are describing - a middleman between the customer and the product, which is offered by a third party. In my mind that’s why they launched this deployment company for example, to do just that in house as well

I agree in the short term. But in the long term, the owners of the compute will become disgustingly rich without a wealth tax, nationalization, or local AI becoming competitive and ubiquitous. There are still problems to solve; the alternative is an absolute oligarchy.

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