ROSS is excited to be a launch partner with OpenAI on their first commercial product: an API.

That means we’re working with OpenAI to refine their API product. We’re testing its accuracy, speed, flexibility, and usefulness in the legal domain.

What is that?

An API is an Application Programming Interface: basically a means of exchanging information between computer systems. By making this API available to developers, OpenAI is lowering the barrier to using a broad class of natural language tasks in a variety of applications across many industries.

Some of the tasks we’ve tested include summarization, content generation, and semantic search.

Our experience

So far, we’ve been delighted to work with the technology. We’re used to working with our own proprietary AI infrastructure: think of our tech stack as a complete outfit made of custom, highly functional garments (like for an athlete, astronaut, or a worker in dangerous conditions). The ROSS outfit is of extremely high quality and fits us really well — but it’s not ideally suited for every occasion (at least not without some drastic alterations and tailoring).

OpenAI’s API, on the other hand, is like a clean white shirt and dark jeans: practical, versatile, and hardy. We’ve been able to try new things really quickly with this technology, without having to make any drastic alterations to our state-of-the-art AI search system. The performance of the technology may not be as accurate as our custom solution, but it’s more versatile for quickly prototyping and iterating.

The technology isn’t fine-tuned to legal documents, like ROSS’s AI is — but that’s partly the point. The API is meant to supercharge the capabilities of all kinds of companies and developers. 

Using the API, we’ve created exciting prototypes that, for example, summarize meetings between lawyers into a memo format and compare legislation across jurisdictions in insightful new ways.

Our hope for better access to justice

We acknowledge that the news of this launch comes at a time when communities around the world are protesting inequality, inequity, injustice and unfairness. We stand with those communities, particularly Black people in the United States and Canada, and we don’t want to take away any focus from the important conversations being had and demands being made.

By participating in this launch and with our other work, we are pursuing our mission to make the legal system available to everyone, and not just the privileged few. In particular, we are participating in this launch to lend our expertise, where appropriate, and to voice any concerns we note about unfairness and the misuse of technology in the legal system.

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. This mission resonates with us here at ROSS, and we appreciate the opportunity to work with OpenAI to more deeply understand the technology’s potential and limitations.