Josh Maley

LegalTech Founder & CEO @Theoremlts | Attorney, Venture Partner and investor

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

The decision matrix here is pretty insane!

"Believe me so regulate - concentrated power is an issue. But don't believe me and let it go unregulated such that concentration is an issue - even if we engender "competition" to avoid antitrust. But now believe me when I walk back about how powerful we're becoming... such that you might not consider regulating again. But then if you don't regulate, perhaps I'm saying it's not that powerful when it actually is - such that you will trust it again, and you missed your opportunity to regulate. Or such that if you do consider regulating, you're back at square one where you created a regulatory capture scenario.... Savvy?"
-- Signed, Capt. Jack Sparrow

[David Sacks @DavidSacks]

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right.

The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations.

Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book.

Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy.

Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax.

There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior.

We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid).

That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior.

America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control.

Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

The decision matrix here is pretty insane! "Believe me so regulate - concentrated power is an issue. But don't believe me and let it go unregulated such that concentration is an issue — even if we engender "competition" to avoid antitrust. But now believe me when I walk back about how powerful we're becoming... such that you might not consider regulating again. But then if you don't regulate, perhaps I'm saying it's not that powerful when it actually is - such that you will trust it again, and you missed your opportunity to regulate. Or such that if you do consider regulating, you're back at square one where you created a regulatory capture scenario.... Savvy?"
Signed, Capt. Jack Sparrow

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

Remember this legaltech . There is going to be a small tech revolution because of these folks.

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@willchen500 @gordon_cassie 😅

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@ZachAbramowitz @sandstonehq I hear good things about all — I’d like to get a listing up and a review / demo of @sandstonehq to publish it to our Inhouse marketplace and community.. We got a lot of buzz and intent signals for Wordsmith during and after CLOC. So something good there pre-funding announcements

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@Jason Crazy comments. I don’t think Jason is saying that many of these companies shouldn’t die because they have no moat, he’s saying you shouldn’t just give them yours.

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

To be fair, most Legal posts get minimal likes...much like most lawyers 😅 Personally, I think the pathways to 1000s more legaltech companies have been laid. LOVE IT. THE REAL SPOILER = even Harvey/Legora have no idea what's going to happen!!! I bet their only worries are internal, like the rest of us.

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@augierakow @nwaisb @harvey @WeAreLegora This AND I think that you can't underestimate financial engineering and the incentives that are created to increase leverage by round tripping revenues.

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@nwaisb @harvey @WeAreLegora @augierakow Agreed — but they just might be tempted, eh? 😅

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@pmarca 🤘💯

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

"Is this it..." A must watch casual convo from @ZachAbramowitz + @willchen500 on LegalTech

Nice work! Solid Theorem development + the big thing for me is that small companies, even solopreneurs, are moving huge mountains in the legal application layer.

What if a company like Persuit or Onit or another major PE backed ELM player was built, end-to-end for like 1/100,000 of the cost and is just AS capable, or even more so...

[WillC @willchen500]

Had a lot of fun speaking with Zach on episode 51 of the Legally Disrupted podcast!

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@DDInvesting @willchen500 On-prem resurgence, carving out its jurisdiction within law . Especially for the type of data Lawyers are dealing with.

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@chamath I’m wondering more and more how close synthetic data can get to these “proprietary” data sets

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

I'm being offered 55% off discounts from SaaS list pricing – that's either telling of the economic situation or how bad saas sales processes have become... what a waste of time for the buyer and seller

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

The "experts" told us SLMs were the next big thing. Then they told us the data-layer is where companies should be positioning – but what if synthetic data could be generated within an acceptable margin from data in proprietary systems? Synthetic data companies will have much cleaner data structure for augmentation. How long until this happens?

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@scottastevenson Predicting a Big M&A season after Several huge players backed by PE also did this. They overpaid to acquire an AI startup in 2022-2024 to help them do so... they’ll need to reset under new assumptions to hit their ~7 year exit timeline, which has already likely been pushed

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

@willchen500 The ARR numbers, if true, would support all this but otherwise … maybe it’s all potentially AI generated ? There’s another word for AI that I don’t commit to, but that word is Artificial. 😅 The Positive is that it’s an incredible motivator trying to make it all reality !!

[Josh Maley @JDMaley]

The level of Clutch from @GeorgeRussell63 👏🤌🤌 @F1 Canadian Gran Prix tomorrow 👀