Introducing TipsyTom. Doubling down on Substack.

The internet was never about Twitter and Linkedin.

“Write longer and more thoughtful posts on Substack, rather than post controversial half statements on Linkedin or write into the Twitter void” - is what I always believed and never quite practised.

Now, I may be forced to practise it.

Twitter yesterday inexplicably throttled Substack links, including my introduction to our work at Deepsy along with the work of 10s of 1000s of others. This is what the co-founder of Substack had to say:

Reflecting the personality of its new owner, Twitter is doing things a bit too "obviously” for everyone’s taste. Linkedin on the other hand has always been shadowbanning/throttling posts that link out to Substack for a longer time now.

This is not to say I don’t like Twitter or Linkedin, they have their uses for me as a consumer of news, social posts and trends. As a content creator or entrepreneur engaging with my audience on my own terms, Linkedin used to be there for sometime but isn’t any longer. Twitter is being hijacked in new ways, apart from the old.

Now to today’s order of business.

Our adventures with “Tipsy” Tom

When we started exploring how to build a generative AI product for contracts, language models weren’t doing as well as today, but they were still doing quite a bit.

We were excited to start on a project that would make AI accessible for lawyers who draft contracts, send legal notices, and put pen to paper in all manner of situations as is the case. Low on ambition, super high on excitement, we wanted lawyers to try generative AI, and yet recognise its limitations. We wanted non-lawyers to be able to access “first-cut drafts” at low effort and cost.

We had to capture all this in the message as much as in the product.

As lawyers, we think of disclaimers in BIG WARNING LETTERS. That’s how we thought about it, at least initially. This changed during a phone call with my father. He said, well, aren’t there incompetent useless people in every profession?

Thats when a light bulb went on. Excitement mixed with caution is Rum Sour, wrong base, right cocktail. So here is how we imagined him:

Now, we do know that generative AI is going to change how legal drafting is done. But we can’t get to there from here, just like that. We also felt we need people to come along, nobody is going to understand this until they get better at it.

It is like - if you aren’t familiar with typing on a keyboard, it is going to be easier and faster to write with pen on paper, until you realise that if you knew know to type, you could type as fast as you speak, but would have to learn shorthand to do that with pen and paper. Shorthand as I recently discovered, is on the script difficulty spectrum of Japanese.

We take people along, by giving them access, and teaching them? So we thought wrote things like this down on the actual website.

Generative AI is at a stage where it is there, yet there is still some way to go.

That doesn’t sound to me like the smartest lawyer in town. And Tipsy Tom, or more respectfully - Tom, shouldn’t try to be one right now. He is still learning the ropes.

But hey, I was a legal intern too once!

With language models improving as fast as they are, and other things that we are now training Tom to do, the time has come probably to share our work with a larger set of our first champions. So here you go!

Tipsy Tom free to register and try, no credit cards required, no excuses.

Help us make you (and your lawyers) champions!