No Priors Ep. 101 | With Harvey CEO and Co-Founder Winston Weinberg

Hi, listeners, and welcome back to No Priors. Today, I'm here with Winston Weinberg, the co-founder and CEO of Harvey, which is building domain-specific AI for law, professional services, and the Fortune 500. They've now raised more than $500 million from investors such as OpenAI, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Bloodgill, and me. We're going to talk about how to do end-to-end workflows, how to serve conservative users, impostor syndrome, keeping pace with the blitz of the AI ecosystem, and also what lawyers will do five years from now. Winston, thanks for doing this.

Yeah, of course.

It has been, like, a wild two and-a-half years for you and Gabe and Harvey. Um, when you started the company in August of 2022, or at least when I met you guys for the seed-

Yeah, we started a little bit earlier, but about then, yeah.

... uh, what was the moment of inspiration?

Yeah. So, Gabe and I actually had met, uh, a couple years before, and I definitely didn't know anything about the startup world and didn't have a plan of, of doing a startup. And what had happened was, he showed me GPT-3, which at the time was, you know, public, and, and I was, first of all, just incredibly surprised that no one was talking about GPT-3 and no one was using it in any way, shape, or form. Um, and he showed me that, and I showed him, kind of, my legal workflows. And we started the, the kind of aha moment was, we went on, uh, r/legaladvice, which is basically, you know, a subreddit where people ask a bunch of legal questions and almost every single answer is, "So who do I sue?" Um, almost every single time. And we took about 100 landlord/tenant questions and we came up with, kind of, some chain-of-thought prompts, and this is before, you know, anyone was talking about chain of thought or anything like that. And we applied it to those landlord/tenant questions and we gave it to three landlord/tenant attorneys. And we just said nothing about AI. We just said, "Here is a question that a potential client asked, and here is an answer. Uh, would you send this answer without any edits to that client? Would you be fine with that? You know, is that ethical? Is it a, a good enough, um, answer to s- to send?" And 86 out of 100 was yes. Um, and actually we cold emailed the general counsel of OpenAI and we sent him these results, and his response basically was, "Oh, I had no idea the models were this good at legal." (laughs)

Nice.

Um, and we, we met with the, the C-suite of OpenAI a co- a couple weeks after.

And, and the view was just, it's going to be good enough. Um, we should build a company around it.

Yeah.

For what domains?

I mean, I, I think what happened, or the reason we were so confident about this, was the models... And, and even with GPT-3, you could get it to do a lot of tasks. You just had to really brute force it, right? Like, you had to brute force the amount of context, telling it which steps to take, et cetera. And the idea was over time this is just gonna get better, right? There are going to be... Either the models themselves are gonna get better or we're gonna be, we're gonna get better over time at figuring out how to provide them the correct context, how to, how to improve them, how to evaluate the results, et cetera. Um, and even just by playing with it for a decent amount of time, you could get that sense.