Ai4 conference reflections: proprietary data, frontier models, private infrastructure

As a lawyer serving as a strategic advisor on innovation for BigLaw while building an AI-native law firm, stepping outside the legal echo chamber can be very productive.

I'm at Ai4 - Artificial Intelligence Conferences in Las Vegas this week, at the Venetian with over 12,000 attendees building and deploying AI across industries ranging from health care to gaming to humanoids.

The conversation I keep thinking about was the chat I had with Varun Gupta, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at Mayo Clinic, about their collaboration with Microsoft on the healthcare frontier model they announced in June. Mayo brought de-identified clinical data and longitudinal insight. Microsoft brought the engineering and the distribution. And Mayo owns the model.A regulated profession sitting on highly sensitive protected data partnered with a leading AI technology company, built an industry-specific model, and kept the asset. The models are becoming increasingly interchangeable. The value is in the previously inaccessible dataset.

At Ai4, my mind is translating everything back to legal. Anthropic's Claude legal plugins and integrations, Harvey, Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal, and a few forward-thinking firms building proprietary data-enhanced workflows on general models. Which makes me wonder, who does the Mayo deal in law, when, and what it does to the competitive market once someone does?

The hardware floor is worth walking too. Vendors selling private and on-prem inference — real models running entirely within an enterprise-controlled environment. For a profession that spent a decade explaining why client data couldn't leave the building before it finally moved to the cloud, I suspect BigLaw may lead the charge back toward private infrastructure.

Forget the swag. I'm entered to win a Mac Mini.

Proprietary data, plus a frontier model, plus infrastructure you control. Three years out, I bet legal looks nothing like it does today.

Kudos to Holland & Knight LLP for sending me here. This is innovation.