some thoughts on astra for law 1) openai is offering astra with a legal search index built on top of courtlistener, a non-profit case database, and with additional instructions for legal analysis 2) the product will be available both through chatgpt and through the api; this means that legal ai companies will also be able to build on top of it 3) openai is also plugins from a number of different legal tech companies, including harvey, relativity, ironclad, etc... so their products can be used as tools by chatgpt 4) i think that this is relevant for a couple of reasons; it is openai creating a vertical product, which eventually may compete with vertical ai application companies 5) i think it challenges vertical ai products like harvey but probably doesn't replace them yet; courtlistener has an incomplete case index 6) and, to my knowledge, there are not enough special ui/ux features; having special tools for tabular review is a selling point of products like harvey 7) but; i think it is relevant as a precedent; openai wants to be the primary interface for law firms; it does not want it to be the product of application ai companies 8) the decision to bring on 26 legal tech companies to offer plugins, as part of the announcement, is also part of this strategy; gemini enterprise for legal did the same 9) it pulls these products into chatgpt as tools; chatgpt can then operate these products as part of its reasoning and tool use to produce its answers and actions 10) i think on the long term this is bad for these companies; chatgpt becomes the interface and your product just becomes a tool that chatgpt calls 11) this makes it much easier for the customer to forget about your product; on the long term, much easier for the customer to swap it out or switch away 12) and, the ai revenue is all going to be going to openai; so the customer's incremental spend will increasingly go to openai rather than you; 13) i suspect that openai and google have offered this firms some protection; like assurances that customers will not be able to export their data easily from them 14) but, i still think, on the long term, this is value accretive to openai and google; and, a net negative for these companies being disintermediated 15) i think this shows why it may be extremely important to own the full service in a professional services context and to own the end customer relationship 16) if you own the full service, including the human element, your customer relationships are more sticky and you are more complementary to the frontier labs;