Old School Tech Lawyer. Advisor/Investor. Formerly RDDT, COIN, GOOG, WSGR. Focus on AI/Content/Legal Hypergrowth. Not the m4 freeway!

WA/ID
Joined April 2007
I wrote this little piece about building legal teams at GOOG, COIN, and RDDT. Different companies, different chaos, same four-part playbook (spoiler: nobody ever has enough headcount!). Let me know what you think! tinyurl.com/mu3fp39m
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I love this post. I have no solutions but I think it explains why task-based AI agents aren't resonating more. I've tried several recently but the friction of coming up with tasks makes me lose interest fast. Always on context would be amazing!
Silicon Valley keeps building me a husband when what I really want is a wife lol I don't want an agent that only does one-off, random tasks that are nice but not life-changing: booking flights, making dinner reservations, or buying tickets I want an AI wife who knows what’s on the family calendar, remembers there’s a birthday party Saturday and we haven’t bought a gift then sends me options, realizes we’re almost out of diapers and buys them, knows which bills are coming up, remembers someone needs a dentist appointment and books it, figures out what the hell we’re eating all week and what we need from the grocery store, and generally keeps track of the 47 things that need to happen before anyone else even realizes they need to happen. So, who's building me an AI wife that carries the mental load instead of an AI husband that waits for me to give it a chore??
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This was particularly acute during Covid times with all learning online and it's why my kids now go to schools that focus on classical learning & education. Minimal computer use allowed. They actually have to think, reason and learn by themselves.
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Just finished reading the filing. It's actually a good read and well written. Gives a layman's overview of the recent OAI security incidents too. Recommend for lawyers playing in the AI space. myfloridalegal.com/sites/def…
Four months ago, we filed the first state-led lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman. Today, we are asking the court for a temporary injunction. Stop calling it safe. Stop pretending it's human. Stop selling it to kids.
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sancho.bearblog.dev/google-w… I've been getting these weird, emotional, AI slop responses recently too. Google Search has become unusable. Makes me sad as a long time Googler: "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" was always our north star.
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100% agree
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead. You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement. I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible. But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier. Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want. Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well. So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it. If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
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Officially leaving private mode after ~10 years. Hello again.
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If you haven’t tried Readwise yet to better organize & remember your online reading, now’s a good time with the new app! Congratulations, Tristan!
today is a huge day for the original readwise highlights app. we completely rebuilt it. early testers have called this modernization "a quantum leap forward." and we hope you'll feel the same (if you use readwise, please let me know what you think!)
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This is the best explanation of the FTX situation that I've read.
FTX was the world's 3rd largest crypto exchange. Today it's said to be insolvent and in the midst of an acquisition by Binance. Here's everything you need to know about Alameda Research and the collapse of FTX: 👇
Milana McCullagh retweeted
Yes! But don't sleep on the First, or especially the Fifth--at least for as long as due process still means something.
There's a common view that US law is more restrictive & less welcoming to crypto than other jurisdictions, but that view ignores the strong individual rights protected by the US Constitution. The Fourth Amendment makes the US the best place in the world for crypto. Here's why 👇
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Milana McCullagh retweeted
BREAKING: FISA court rejects Justice Dept's catch-22 secrecy argument, @EFF's case will proceed eff.org/r.5bT8
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Milana McCullagh retweeted
the point is we all breach ToS agreements all the time -- some of us get prosecuted by the DoJ and some don't: eff.org/deeplinks/2013/04/ar…
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Lovely piece about some of my fav ex-colleagues/friends. Amazing lawyers & I'm lucky to have worked closely with them. goo.gl/5EhIB
Milana McCullagh retweeted
You must read wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/… . Then please please turn on 2 factor authentication: support.google.com/accounts/…
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Milana McCullagh retweeted
Excited to have Geena Davis & Jennifer Siebel Newsom screen their new film 'Miss Representation' at the Mtn View campus today!
Milana McCullagh retweeted
Wow. Great set of articles in "The Next Digital Decade" @BerinSzoka, Now that's how you launch a think tank! nextdigitaldecade.com/read-b…
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Milana McCullagh retweeted
Some nice news out of Italy for Google: http://goo.gl/razGs Background links: http://goo.gl/kB6cT and http://goo.gl/mcJ97
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